There is a massive difference between chemical processes, like fire, and computational processes, which thinking likely is. A computer can absolutely be made to interact with the world in a way that assigns real physical meaning to the symbols it manipulates, a meaning entirely independent of any conscious being. For example, the computer that powers an automatic door has a clear meaning for its symbols intrinsic in its construction.

Saying that the symbols in the computer don't mean anything, that it is only we who give them meaning, presupposes a notion of meaning as something that only human beings and some things similar to us possess. It is an entirely circular argument, similarly to the notion of p-zombies or the experience of seizing red thought experiment.

If indeed the brain is a biological computer, and if our mind, our thinking, is a computation carried out by this computer, with self-modeling abilities we call "qualia" and "consciousness", then none of these arguments hold. I fully admit that this is not at all an established fact, and we may still find out that our thinking is actually non-computational - though it is hard to imagine how that could be.

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mjburgess 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There are no such things as "computational processes". Any computational description of reality describes vastly different sets of casual relata, nothing which exists in the real world is essentially a computational process -- everything is essential causal, with a circumstantially useful computational description.

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tsimionescu 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On the contrary, computation is a very clear physical phenomenon, well understood and studied, so well understood that we can build machines to do it. And, again, those machines don't need any interpretation - they do measurable things in the real world, such as opening doors and cutting parts.

	▲	mjburgess an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have never encountered this physical process. Here I am typing on a keyboard which is powered through an electrical field that is guided by a peice of wire under each key -- whose operation, when mechanically activated, is to induce some electrical state in some switches it is connected to, and so on. I associate the key with "K", and my screen displays a "K" shape when it is pressed -- but there is no "K", this is all in my head. Just as much as when I go to the cinema and see people on the screen: there are no people. By ascribing a computational description to a series of electrical devices (whose operation distributes power, etc.) I can use this system to augment by own thinking. Absent the devices, the power distribution, their particular casual relationships to each other, there is no computer. The computational description is an observer-relative attribution to a system; there are no "physical" properties which are computational. All physical properties concern spatio-temporal bodies and their motion. The real dualism is to suppose there are such non-spatio-temporal "process". The whole system called a "computer" is an engineered electrical device whose construction has been designed to achive this illusion. Likewise I can describe the solar system as a computational process, just discretize orbits and give their transition in a while(true) loop. That very same algorithm describes almost everything. Physical processes are never "essentially" computational; this is just a way of specifying some highly superficial feature which allows us to ignore their causal properties. Its mostly a useful description when building systems, ie., an engineering fiction.

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close04 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Talking about simulations misses a critical aspect. The only thing that can accurately simulate a process or system is the actual, real process or system. Everything else contains simplifications and approximations.

Fire is the result of the intrinsic reactivity of some chemicals like fuels and oxidizers that allows them to react and generate heat. A simulation of fire that doesn't generate heat is missing a big part of the real thing, it's very simplified. Compared to real fire, a simulation is closer to a fire emoji, both just depictions of a fire. A fire isn't the process of calculating what happens, it's molecules reacting a certain way, in a well understood and predictable process. But if your simulation is accurate and does generate heat then it can burn down a building by extending the simulation into the real world with a non-simulated fire.

Consciousness is an emergent property from putting together a lot of neurons, synapses, chemical and physical processes. So you can't analyze the parts to simulate the end result. You cannot look at the electronic neuron and conclude a brain accurately made of them won't generate consciousness. It might generate something even bigger, or nothing.

And in a very interesting twist of the mind, if an accurate simulation of a fire can extend in the real world as a real fire, then why wouldn't an accurate simulation of a consciousness extent in the real world as a real consciousness?