I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation, while they easily accept that consciousness is a physical process.

Computation is something that a computer provably does. We build physical hardware, at great effort, to do computation. The hardware works and does the computation regardless of whether there is anyone to understand or interpret it. If it didn't, we couldn't have built anything like, say, an automatic door: that is a form of computation that provably happens as a physical process that is completely observer-independent.

Sure, a different entity than a human might view it completely differently than a door opening when someone is near - but the measurable physical effect would be the exact same, with the exact same change in momentum and position of the atoms in what we call the door based on the relative position of some other atoms and the sensor.

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gwd 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation

Possibly very early AI misled people here. In the 80's, a huge amount of AI was logic manipulation; "If A then B is valid"; "A is true"; therefore, "B is true". It's not hard to see how people would conclude that that sort of symbolic manipulation could never result in consciousness.

But modern neural nets aren't like that at all. Calling modern neural nets "symbolic manipulation" seems insane; like calling libraries forests, and insisting we can apply scientific principles about forests to them, because books are made of trees.

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cameldrv 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The issue that the paper brings up is that the same physical process can be interpreted as multiple different computational processes. If the content of consciousness (the hard problem, qualia) is only dependent on the computational process, and not its particular physical instantiation, then which qualia are generated from a particular physical process?

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tsimionescu 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The issue that the paper brings up is that the same physical process can be interpreted as multiple different computational processes.

I don't think this is relevant to the notion that consciousness is a form of computation.

The assertion that consciousness is a form of computation basically means that the physical process that happens in the brain/body that we recognize as consciousness can be described in terms of a computational process. A consequence of this, if it is true, is that replicating the same computation in a CPU would make the physical process that happens in the CPU just as conscious - assuming that we had identified the correct computation.

In this theory, the thing that would be conscious would be the physical CPU, just like the thing that is conscious is a physical human brain/body. The computation is just an abstract description of the common properties between the CPU and the human brain/body. It's not relevant that we could also describe the process inside the CPU as being a completely different computation - the abstract model is only required to be able to build and program the CPU.

To go back to my mechanical door analogy: we create an abstract model of the computations needed to make a computational system open a door when a person is near. We use this model to create the computational system, and we see the door opening when a person goes near the sensor. Now, we can interpret the computation happening inside the system in many other ways - but that won't change the fact that the door opens when a person is near, in any way.

I am not claiming that any of this constitutes proof that consciousness must be a computation. What I'm claiming though is that the paper, and similar arguments, are not refuting the right claims, and generally have a misunderstanding of what "computation" actually means, and its relation to physical processes.

	▲	cameldrv 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The "hard problem" is talking about the thing that it's like to be you, to experience what is happening. I don't know about you, but I only experience one set of things happening at once, i.e. it doesn't feel like I am in two places at once or that there are two completely different versions of my life happening simultaneously. If the physical thing that is conscious is the CPU, what are the contents of its consciousness if there are multiple interpretations of what it is computing? Now maybe somehow there are in fact multiple consciousnesses inhabiting the CPU. I don't experience that though, so I don't have a positive reason to believe that that's true.

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wdbm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why assume there has to be a one-to-one mapping? Why assume one physical process can't correspond to an infinity of different qualia?

We assume an infinity of wave-functions correspond to a single physical process without difficulty.

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Maxatar 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation

The abstraction is over the multitude of different physical ways that computation can be performed. That is the role of abstraction, to separate something from a particular means of implementation so that we can think about computation without having to fix a particular physical process.

	▲	tsimionescu 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but I don't think that's what this paper and other similar ones are saying. I agree, of course, that things like programming languages or algorithms or even logical circuit diagrams are abstractions, obviously. But they are abstract descriptions of a real physical process that happens, for example, inside a CPU - in exactly the same way that an electrical diagram is an abstract descriptio of a real physical process that happens in an electrical circuit, or a thermodynamic calculation is a description of what happens inside an engine. But the engine, the electrical circuit, and the computation inside the CPU are objective realities. There could be many other ways to describe and characterize the same physical realities, of course, but that doesn't make them observer-dependent phenomena.

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twosdai 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Really great point. I have wondered that as well.

Even weirder to me is that in the case of a person doing the computation on a board or paper or whatever medium, its still computation. This time the physical medium doing the work, is the human and their brain.

If consciousness can be proven to emerge from computation alone, then in a way we humans with our brains can simulate a new consciousness.