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The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. But that's just an assumption and there are man

The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No. The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions, and it makes them feel like they have extremely transferable knowledge. "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness." But there is very little reason to accept that assumption. This review of Harai's Homo Deus does a great job of pointing out the dead-ends that assumption leads you to. [review](https://inference-review.com/article/godzooks#When:00:35:00Z https://inference-review.com/article/godzooks#When:00:35:00Z)

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions No, it's not because of that. It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic. TL;DR: what else could it be? And before someone says "antenna", I don't buy it. "Computer" is a simpler explanation for all known facts than remote consciousness being received by the brain. See my take on this before[0]. See also: Occam's razor. > "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness." Yeah, well, sure. If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness. Like, I wouldn't say "it's vulnerable to SQL injection" because that would be an idiotic statement. But I could say "it implements visual processing, audio processing, collects other telemetry, and does sensor fusion in real-time in under 20 Watts, with power to spare". Because that's observation, physics, and modelling reality along a particular perspective of interest. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19490801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19490801
- egjerlow 7y ago
  > as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic. Rather, the things that seem somehow magical to us we either explain scientifically, or we ignore. I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. These are datapoints, they're just unfortunately not datapoints that can be used for scientific inquiry. But then again, there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have. Regardless of this, there is a reason to assume a big metaphysical mystery, simply because consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen. > there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have. There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality. And to be clear - I'm not saying that as someone who has Faith in Science (as opposed to religion). It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense. > consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.
tialaramex 7y ago
> The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter (probably at length) without offering any substance. In a sense that's the wrong way up to explain it. Church-Turing intuitively defines computation (the things computers can do) in terms of what our brains can do, so the match is not a coincidence but it also isn't there for the reason you probably expect. Because it's an intuition Church-Turing isn't provable, but you may notice that we subsequently built an _entire world-changing industry_ upon it in a lifetime. You pointed to a review, others have written entire books, always they can be summarised as simply arguments from incredulity. "What? Nonsense, the brain can't be a computer, I simply won't believe that". It's unfortunate that we have woken such people from their daydreaming, I have no doubt that if similarly aroused they'd give the mathematicians what for too, "What? Nonsense, how can there be numbers which aren't ratios of whole numbers, I simply won't believe it".
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  Not so extraordinary. What's extraordinary isn't that brains can compute, it's that anything else can. Brains computing is ordinary. What's extraordinary about the brain isn't that it can compute. What's extraordinary about the brain is that it can be rational and self-aware, things that computers cannot do. Computers can only be deterministic. Brains can be deterministic, but they can also be non-deterministic
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Computers can become non-deterministic in practice as soon as you botch your random number handling, or hook your input up to environmental noise. Is there anything suggesting the brain is non-deterministic in a theoretical way, not just the way computers are?
    - vinceguidry 7y ago
      Deterministic means that given the same input, the system gives the same output. Computers would be useless if they were not deterministic. Hooking up random input to a deterministic process will give random output. Garbage in, garbage out. What you're asking is for computers to be rational. That given garbage input, it will produce intelligible output. Computers cannot do this unless you program them to. Human minds are non-deterministic in many, many, many ways. Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time, unless the mind willed itself to act rationally. But they are deterministic enough that you can study their behavior. Other brains are not as non-deterministic, so their behavior is easier to study. Look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint. Biological systems arose to conserve order against entropy. A fully-deterministic system will shed order, it's only through non-deterministic means that biological systems can conserve order. The mind is the most complex system nature has devised that can not only slow the aggregation of entropy, but also create order! It's not breaking the laws of physics, but yet it can create all kinds of order. Conway's Game of Life is an excellent illustration of the concept. You have to work hard and study the domain in order to find stable systems. Otherwise they just drop to equilibrium fast.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions No, it's not because of that. It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic. TL;DR: what else could it be? And before someone says "antenna", I don't buy it. "Computer" is a simpler explanation for all known facts than remote consciousness being received by the brain. See my take on this before[0]. See also: Occam's razor. > "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness." Yeah, well, sure. If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness. Like, I wouldn't say "it's vulnerable to SQL injection" because that would be an idiotic statement. But I could say "it implements visual processing, audio processing, collects other telemetry, and does sensor fusion in real-time in under 20 Watts, with power to spare". Because that's observation, physics, and modelling reality along a particular perspective of interest. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19490801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19490801

egjerlow 7y ago
> as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic. Rather, the things that seem somehow magical to us we either explain scientifically, or we ignore. I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. These are datapoints, they're just unfortunately not datapoints that can be used for scientific inquiry. But then again, there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have. Regardless of this, there is a reason to assume a big metaphysical mystery, simply because consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen. > there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have. There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality. And to be clear - I'm not saying that as someone who has Faith in Science (as opposed to religion). It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense. > consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.

tialaramex 7y ago

> The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter (probably at length) without offering any substance. In a sense that's the wrong way up to explain it. Church-Turing intuitively defines computation (the things computers can do) in terms of what our brains can do, so the match is not a coincidence but it also isn't there for the reason you probably expect. Because it's an intuition Church-Turing isn't provable, but you may notice that we subsequently built an _entire world-changing industry_ upon it in a lifetime. You pointed to a review, others have written entire books, always they can be summarised as simply arguments from incredulity. "What? Nonsense, the brain can't be a computer, I simply won't believe that". It's unfortunate that we have woken such people from their daydreaming, I have no doubt that if similarly aroused they'd give the mathematicians what for too, "What? Nonsense, how can there be numbers which aren't ratios of whole numbers, I simply won't believe it".

vinceguidry 7y ago
Not so extraordinary. What's extraordinary isn't that brains can compute, it's that anything else can. Brains computing is ordinary. What's extraordinary about the brain isn't that it can compute. What's extraordinary about the brain is that it can be rational and self-aware, things that computers cannot do. Computers can only be deterministic. Brains can be deterministic, but they can also be non-deterministic
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Computers can become non-deterministic in practice as soon as you botch your random number handling, or hook your input up to environmental noise. Is there anything suggesting the brain is non-deterministic in a theoretical way, not just the way computers are?
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    Deterministic means that given the same input, the system gives the same output. Computers would be useless if they were not deterministic. Hooking up random input to a deterministic process will give random output. Garbage in, garbage out. What you're asking is for computers to be rational. That given garbage input, it will produce intelligible output. Computers cannot do this unless you program them to. Human minds are non-deterministic in many, many, many ways. Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time, unless the mind willed itself to act rationally. But they are deterministic enough that you can study their behavior. Other brains are not as non-deterministic, so their behavior is easier to study. Look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint. Biological systems arose to conserve order against entropy. A fully-deterministic system will shed order, it's only through non-deterministic means that biological systems can conserve order. The mind is the most complex system nature has devised that can not only slow the aggregation of entropy, but also create order! It's not breaking the laws of physics, but yet it can create all kinds of order. Conway's Game of Life is an excellent illustration of the concept. You have to work hard and study the domain in order to find stable systems. Otherwise they just drop to equilibrium fast.