James Ramsden

@ThePremiseOfIt @YosarianTwo Wait, is it your view that consciousness is "manifestly non-physical"? How does one come to such a view outside of religious dogma?

@JamRam96 @YosarianTwo The reason there's an ontological difference between *physical* phenomena and *simulations* exist is because the outputs are completely, tangibly different. Acting like there's an obvious difference in the outcome of something manifestly non-phtwical is lazy false equivalence.

I really want "AI can not be intelligent by defintion" people to explain what they mean by "intelligence". Or better yet, to make concrete predictions about what they think LLM's won't be able to do because they lack "intelligence" and then notice when they do those things.

@YosarianTwo Because of that attractor property, we could use neurons to do computations (as has been done already), but this doesn't imply that any network of neurons is a computer; computation is a particular thing, and requires a conceptual map between the physical and the symbolic

@YosarianTwo That's not to say physical systems cannot have stable attractors, and neurons can be thought of as having two of those which we could term "on" and "off", but we must be aware that such quantisations are not part of the neuron itself, only of our particular conceptual framework

@aboupinel @YosarianTwo Fair, at least not without further justification, which I give later.

@JamRam96 @YosarianTwo the inference from « consciousness is a physically instantiated process » to « computers can only simulate consciousness » is obviously not warranted

@YosarianTwo As an aside, having dabbled in electrical engineering, I can say this is untrue. The physics of all circuits is continuous, and the output voltage of a FET is unquantized. We assign "on" or "off" to a FET's output based on a voltage threshold, but the o/p voltage itself floats

@JamRam96 A circut in a computer either fires or does not transmit electricity according to real-world physics. Nothing makes one more or less "symbolic" than the other

@YosarianTwo Ah, but of the two, only computation is intrinsically symbolic. Electromechanical computation *requires* a symbolic map between: - the evolution of a concrete system (the computing machine) along a physics, and - the evolution of an abstract system (an algorithm) along a logic

@JamRam96 Descartes was a brilliant man, but we understand the brain better than he did. In any case consciousness can and must rely on a physical system and have both physical inputs and outputs if it were to have any meaning at all.

@YosarianTwo So a computational system cannot physically instantiate consciousness, it could only ever simulate doing so. This, for me, implies that a computer can't *understand* things (because understanding is a subset of consciousness), so ipso facto cannot exhibit human-level intelligence

@YosarianTwo In other words, computation depends on some extrinsically constructed relation between a physical system and an abstract system. However, consciousness, as Descartes famously observes, depends on nothing extrinsic to itself whatsoever.

@YosarianTwo This is like how a clock does not itself contain the idea of "3:00PM", neurons do not "fire" or "not fire"; they simply change continuously. The alphabetisation of those changes is a construct of *ours* that we impose on the behaviour of the neuron

@YosarianTwo Nothing about the behaviour of a neuron is intrinsically discrete or alphabetised, it does in fact behave continuously in physical space, according not to an algorithm (which is a symbolic, logical structure), but according to a real-world physics

@YosarianTwo It's likely that neurons are much more complex than logic gates, most physical systems are.

@YosarianTwo The neuron contains no symbols, it's just a physical system, behaving according to a continuous physics. You have a cognitive need to narrow its behaviours down to "On" or "Off" in order to help you understand it, but this is a result of your cognition, not of neuronal behaviour

@YosarianTwo That's not relevant. What is clear is that consciousness itself is a physical process, like photosynthesis. As such, a computer simulation of whatever the brain is doing can never be conscious, just like a simulation of photosynthesis cannot produce oxygen molecules.

@JamRam96 Sure, but the brain is fundamentally running simulations of the world whenever you think. If you want to decide what to eat for dinner you run a little simulation in your brain of what eating the pasta dish might taste like and how it will feel to eat it.

@YosarianTwo And at any rate, I'm not sure that "using your brain to simulate thinking" is possible or even meaningful. However, one can readily appreciate the ont. distinction between "X system" and "computer simulation of X system"; the former is physically instantiated, the latter is not.

@YosarianTwo I never made such a claim, because I don't make the assumption you make; that conscious thoughts are causally downstream of some form of computation. The brain can not just be doing computations, because computation is an intrinsically symbolic (not just physical) process.