> I understand that it troubles you that real computation can be done with marbles... but... it can.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. It doesn’t trouble me at all. I’m actually quite confident I could design a simple computer from scratch in a substrate of marbles and an electric motor to bring them back up.
Maybe we should separate these threads otherwise it’ll be too hard to keep branching out.
I must have misunderstood where you were drawing the line of absurdity.
I'm comfortable going slower - although the site won't let me reply as quickly as it let's you.
So I take it that you disbelieve that consciousness/qualia can be created by computation. But you do believe, I suspect, that consciousness/qualia are a physical process. So I'm wondering, is this the only example of non-computable physical process you know of?
Let me apologize for having to discontinue now, or my girlfriend will dump me for being more interested in talking to you than her tonight. Another time!
I’ll just leave this comment to start a thread to ask you about your position and then figure out how I’d like to address your question later.
Your position seems to have non-trivial difficulties if its own. I take it you don’t believe that a sequence of unique rock states or wall states is conscious, which means consciousness is not merely caused by an abstract mapping to some sequence of information states. I.e., I gather you must believe there is something about the organization or causal structure of the processing necessary for consciousness. Before continuing I’ll share another thought experiment just to suggest why this must be. Put two supposed conscious AIs into conversation for a day. Take a long time writing down the states line by line in a (very!) big notebook. Then cover up each line with other sheets who paper, revealing them line by line in a sequence. From our perspective the same conversation must be getting expressed by the two AIs, but surely we don’t think this results in a new conscious experience for the two AIs modeled by the states.
Okay then my challenge to your position (and mine of course, but this is why I’m led to my beliefs ultimately) is it must explain (1) which kinds of casual and organizational structures count here and (2) how these result in conscious experience.
It seems to me that even though I also cannot meaningfully answer these, believing there is some special physics going on which is yet to be discovered seems necessary. I.e. the how part is that it’s just a feature of that physical process. The which kinds are “the physical ones of the right kind inherently have consciousness”. And I will point out that there has rarely been a time in the last 2000 years when we as humans did not think we were nearly at the end of understanding physics.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. It doesn’t trouble me at all. I’m actually quite confident I could design a simple computer from scratch in a substrate of marbles and an electric motor to bring them back up.
Maybe we should separate these threads otherwise it’ll be too hard to keep branching out.