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M&M's are a nice enhancement to the beer-can example you’ used before. You’e got a great case there, David. (A case of beer, or of M&M's, though?)

What is different about your subjective assignment of consciouness to a pattern represented in flesh and your subjective assignment of consciousness to a pattern incarnated in M&M's ?

In either case you are doing the interpretation, and I don't see how you can make the case that your interpretation of what you accept as conscious is free from the relativity of interpretation.

I'm not assigning consciousness to a pattern in my flesh. I'm taking the fact that I'm conscious as indisputable, and Descartes agrees. Kurzweil is equating consciousness with a pattern. Patterns of symbols are not themselves conscious, as my blog entry tries to show, or else a bucket of M&Ms both is and is not conscious.

I'm taking the fact that I'm conscious as indisputable, and Descartes agrees.

Maybe it is the M&Ms looking out at us, thinking, "I bet we could download our 'minds' into that wet gooey thing." We are only "conscious" because we (or Descartes) say we are.

Seriously though: Your statement that the M&Ms are both conscious and non-conscious at the same time is not true from the point of view of a single observer. If I remember what Einstein said (which I'm sure I don't), it doesn't matter what anyone else sees or thinks, only what the observer in question sees.

Ok, Brett, then let's change it. As I'm giving the pile of M&Ms the value of up=1 and down=0, I could also say that any M&M next to a brown one is a 1 and any next to a blue one is a 0, in which case the same "bit" (= an M&M) could be a 1 and a 0, and the pile could be conscious in the up/down way but not conscious in the colored-neighbors way. Contradiction.

Whoah... that really freaks me out man.

That's just absurd. You are in no position to declare the candy consious or non-concious - only it itself knows (or doesn't know).

And if the universe were a random chace simulation with 10^100 M&Ms, you'd never know otherwise.

Searle may be a very bright guy, but the Chinese Room thought experiment is a crock. I may make some comment about time at the end of this, which is the only thing really at issue.

First, the synthetic/symbolic distinction isn't significant. I'm coming from the perspective of "formal systems", which essentially means digital. Now, it may be that the analog/digital distinction is important here, which would make a difference, but I doubt it, and you haven't made any such claim, so I'll ignore this problem. Now, my definition of a symbol, is a token in a formal system, so I consider all this to be about whether strong AI is possible for digital systems of sufficient complexity.

M&Ms, beer cans or a field of grain are not conscious, and cannot be because there is no computational process linking the elements together or to a sensory system either. States of consciousness are not static patterns, but complex recursively interconnected patterns in time and space, so you must not only similate the pattern, but also the processes by which the pattern evolves. Let's say you did accomplish the task of transferring all the time/space patterns of Kurzwiel's brain into a digital system (20 years from now). If you flip the meanings of all the bits, then you must compliment the rules at the same time. Bits are not arbitrary because specific bit patterns are instructions for the machine, and the I/O devices as well.

I've stated several times that I don't think this type of brain transfer will be possible (an open question), but even if it is, the simulation is likely to be somewhat out of sync with the original, and that could actually cause the whole process to break down. I think this issue of time is part of why many find the Chinese Room persuasive unless you can imagine lightning fast activity on the part of the demons carrying out the rule sets, it wouldn't be fast enough to be interesting.

This doesn't mean that only carbon-based flesh like ours can be conscious. But it does mean that patterns aren't enough and that there's something special — not necessarily unique — about flesh.

Perhaps, but what? If strong AI is possible, then there will be something special about the technological substrate of the beings that emerge from this process. Will they be human? Unlikely. Will we have anything in common? Quite a lot, probably.

As for Wolfram, time will tell. As I said, I think he is missing something fundamental, but that's fine except for all the overblown claims. The discovery of Turing equivalence in very simple cellular automatons is significant, and suggestive in terms of establishing computation as the basis for many physical processes. That's the only part I see that is unique to Wolfram, but I may be missing something too.

OK, I think I've located the quote from 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' at the heart of your argument: "Thinking, and thus knowledge, requires not only a brain but also a world and a body".

But is anybody really saying otherwise? Surely nobody is imagining that the Kurzweil simulator does not receive input from the external world, or produce output into that world. In fact the way in which it relates input to output is exactly what we use to gauge its intelligence. It is part of the experimental setup.

I imagine you would still be unwilling to grant consciousness to the Kurzweil simulator even with such an augmentation?
To me it seems a nonessential admission to make from a strong AI point of view.

Bertrand Russell once said "life is nothing but an accidental co-location of atoms". We can rightly call this statement reductionist, because it misses a whole lot about life we all know is true, but the statement still makes a point which is true - that particular arrangements of particular atoms can be found in everything we call life. Russell was making some other points as well - especially that there was no special extra ingredient, an "elan vital", which makes those dead atoms alive. (I leave aside the "accidental" bit)

So saying that "life is a ... co-location of atoms" is saying something useful, but it is hardly an adequate description of the particular version of life that is us. We depend upon a lot more concepts than patterns of atoms to provide more useful descriptions of us.

Now if we say that computers are "symbolic processors", we are certainly saying something useful and correct, but it is not necessarily an adequate description of the complexity and capability of a modern computer system, and doesn't rule out the potential capability in the future. It may be true that today's computers couldn't do anything that we would want to describe as having conscious experience, but it won't be because they are just processors of symbols. It will be because we have not been able to make them sufficiently complex. The complexity and interactions with its own sub-systems and the environment it is in does really matter.

Life "really is" a collection of atoms in a particular arrangement, but we don't decide from that, that the particular arrangement of atoms we call a human can't possibly be alive because of it. Its true that there is more than just the arrangement (pattern) of atoms - there is also all the complexity in the system and its interactions.

In the end I think Searle's argument takes a similar reductionist approach, which makes it sound obvious that since a computer "just manipulates symbols", it could never do anything except simulate concious experience.

But he leaves out the potential complexity, and therefore rules out a whole lot of possibilities that are worth exploring in our quest to understand conscious experience. The chinese room thought experiment is the same thing - he tells us that the clever (it has comprehensive rules), but simple (it just manipulates symbols) system he describes proves that the room cannot really understand chinese, though it provides a really good simulation of it. If, however, you imagined a far more complex system, you might equally be forced to describe it as understanding chinese, because it processed the inputs more like the brain does - whose neurons, remember, just contain particular arrangements of dead atoms.

I wouldn't rule out Kuzweil's ideas just yet. I think Searle has a point about the unique biological nature of conscious experience (remember philosophers like David Chalmers believe in strong AI, but also think that conscious experience is an extra fundamental force or element in the universe, like gravity or something, rather than a result of complexity). Searle dismisses him too (rightly, I think).

But in the end I reckon that if we could "download" our neuronal patterns to a computer, which also had all the necessary complexity and interactions with the environment, the conscious experience might well exist, but it would instantly start to deviate from the original flesh and blood version. Its the complex interactions as well the patterns (not that I pretend to understand that complexity or what it might take to get it to work in a computer).

Claus, what part of "body" don't you understand :) When I wrote "body" I actually meant a body, not a simulation of a body. Adding more symbols to a symbolic processor makes it a better representation of brain activity but doesn't make it a brain; adding more symbols makes it a better representation of consciousness but doesn't make it conscious. Hofstadter's piece in "The Mind's I" that postulates "downloading" Einstein's neural states into a book - including the ability to add new inputs and see what the book tells us Einstein would say in response - to me is a pretty convincing proof that symbolic processors are symbolic, not conscious.

Likewise, Virgil, I don't believe consciousness is simply a matter of complexity. Make it a trillion M&Ms and add in whatever input mechanisms you want (nano-hands flipping the M&Ms to simulate experience, whatever), and it's still just a big, messy pile of M&Ms because their 1 and 0 states are purely symbolic, just as a computer's 1 and 0s are.

Do you think that if we simulated all the cells or molecules or atoms in an entire human body that that simulation would itself be alive? I actually can't predict your answers to this question.

Great discussion. Claus' gets to the point about the need to be-in-the-world, but deeper arguments (ala Winograd and Flores, Understandign Computers and Cognition) suggest that it is more than just having the I/O capabilities to interact, but also the in the sense of having arived here as a result of a historical evolutionary co-existence with the biological environment. That's a lot harder to achieve than some sort of advanced Turing test, but we are starting to see the emergence in the science and mathematics of complex systems science, an understanding of some of the critical aspects of evolutinary processes. This points to what is "special" about meat, and even if we can invent systems that exhibit strong AI, I am also speculating that they will be radically different because of the radical difference in how they are in-the-world.

Vergil adds a lot by bringing in Russel and that discussion. Bucky says something similar in the introduction to Synergetics, where he says that when science looks down into the organs, cells, molecules and then atoms of living organisms, there is no point at which you see a hard transition from living systems to non-living atoms. He concludes that everything in the world participates in consciousness. This is similar to Chalmers (perhaps), but it doesn't anticipate complex systems science and the ideas about emergent properties. Still, I don't think you can reject out of hand the idea that properties like consciousness are not there in primitive form in the most basic assemblages of atoms. On the other hand, it is hard to see how to make statements about this into a falsifyable hypothesis, so I would make this an issue for faith, not science.

One last comment about symbolic processing. If/when we have an example of strong AI, the system is likely to be processing digital symbols at the most basic level, but this is just like saying we are assemblages of atoms (true, but not the main point). To the extend that "symbolic processing" is a reference to the original program of AI to build intellegent systems by writing programs that manipulate the same sorts of symbols that we toss about in language, I think that Searle and others (i.e. David, Winograd and Flores) have a strong point. You might be able to do some interesting things, but it is a failure as an approach to strong AI. The error is in extending this failure to suggest that we won't eventually make some real progress with a deeper understanding of complex systems.

Hmmm ... "simply a matter of complexity"? Nice turn of phrase, David. I'm not sure how to respond to that. I think that consciousness is completely a function of the complexity of the human body/brain, evolved that way over millions of years. If by saying you think consciousness is not "simply a matter of complexity" you mean there is an "extra something", then what might that be?

I think when I say its the complexity, I mean just that, it really complex! A complex interaction of the neurons, constant assessing of simultaneous inputs, all kinds of pattern matching and whatever else goes on. I suppose I am using the word complexity to stand for whatever it takes to make us conscious, so if you manage to come up with that something extra about flesh that makes us conscious, I'd probably say "yeah, that's what I meant by complexity" . (Roger Penrose thinks its quantum effects in cellular microtubules in the brain - not that I really comprehend what is meant by that). If that turns out to be right, then he will have discovered something at the physical level which directly effects the biological level. I doubt it, skeptic that I am, but its an interesting line of thought).

Complexity doesn't mean more and more M&Ms randomly flipping around. That is just more possible states. The complexity has to do with the way these states are the result of interactions between the M&Ms - there has to be some sort of mechanism, or ability to react to various stimuli, some ability of the states in one part to affect the states in another, which in turn affect other states, which turn cause some other stimulus, which feeds back ... etc etc. I can't see how the M&M analogy is anything but a gross oversimplification. If the point is just that "its not simply some arbitrary set of states" then I agree, consciousness isn't that. Everything else I have added is what I happily call "complexity", because then I can (at least temporarily) avoid having to explain precisely what I mean by it.

But I'll try to answer your last question. Your question is a bit like the old philosophical "zombie" argument though - where you are supposed to be able to imagine a creature which is in every way like a human, down to the last cell and piece of DNA, but it doesn't have conscious experience. I can't actually imagine that. Built into the zombie argument is the idea that there is something else other than the biology (and all its complexity of interaction with the environment), so there is no way to argue with you, I just assert that the zombie is really conscious and to think otherwise is just a contradiction.

Similarly, when you ask whether building a simulation of the human body, down to the atoms, would be alive, I feel its a bit of a trick question. (if its a simulation, then by definition it can't be alive). On the other hand, if its a perfect simulation, than by definition, how could you tell whether it was alive or not? I have my doubts about saying it wasn't alive.

The problem, i think, is that today we can't get anywhere remotely near the complexity that is displayed in biological systems, in the interactions of a computer system. Its still just too easy say "hey its only a simulation, just manipulation of some symbols, just following preprogrammed rules" . I am still just an bunch of proteins interacting in an Immensely complex way (uppercase "I" done in order to make the immense even more immense), yet I am alive. If I could make a perfect simulation, I think I would have to conclude it was alive - 'cause that's what perfect simulation would have to mean.

[At this point in a discussion like this in real space, not virtual space, we are into the third bottle of wine and I find myself able to agree with almost anything. Think I'll go pour a glass right now]

Kurzweill's AI ideas remind me of most economists - assume away the really interesting problems, define what we know how to solve as reality and characterize the rest as an externality. Nice work, if you can get it.

Kurzweill assumes that the mind can be reduced to the state of a network of neurons. This ignores the fact that the network of neurons exists in relation to a body, a world, a devlopmental history, an evolutionary history, a cultural history and a personal history. The 'mind simulator' doesn't simply need an I/O channel for the body and external world, it would need a body, world and life simulator to the the relationship between the neuron state and these 'external factors'. The key point is that neuron states aren't representations, they are relationships. Kurzweill assumes away all these harder and much more difficult problems.

Another category of error is the assumption that consciousness is the product of process happeing within the individual. I was a little surprised by David's retreat to Cartesian concepts on this point. My intuition is that consciousness is not an emergent property of neurons, it is an emergent property of networks of people. Perhaps a network of SiliconRay chips could evolve a language and a culture and therefore consciousness but the concept on an individual conciousness makes no sense to me.

Even if the SiliconRay network did evolve consciousness, it is less clear that we would know or could even understand that type of conciousness.

The strongAI program that attempts to reduce mind to an emergent propery of neurons misses all the really wonderous questions.

David, at last I think I can make a statement you would agree with: It is very hard to describe to others exactly WHAT one understands of and by something.

First of all: When we equip the Kurzweil simulation with an embodiment, in terms of an interface with the world, I am not talking simulation, but rather the actual physical hardware we are simulating on. To make it even more interesting, suppose this is actually a physical simulation of Kurzweil at the cellular level - each cell in the body being simulated by nano machines.
This accomplishes two things. First of all it eliminates some of the freedom of interpretation that your proof relies on. If we acknowledge the constancy of our own physical senses we will also have to acknowledge the constancy of the machine interface.
Secondly, we now have an actual physical system with the two peculiar qualities that it is completely described at the neuronal level, and that we have a sneaking suspicion that given physical stimuli it would react exactly like Ray Kurzweil would to the same stimuli.
I assume you would say that this is still just a candy bin?
Would it matter if the nano-machines were constructed from bio-matter? I.e. if we were talking about an industrially produced complete biological copy of Kurzweil?

Obviously there is a difference between having a blueprint for Ray and having the actual Ray, but isn't the interesting question whether or not a blueprint for Ray is possible at all?
Of course that position soon becomes much more radical, since having a blueprint for Ray and understanding the dynamics of Rays perfectly means that we can compute - using unconscious computers if you like - other blueprints for Ray's at other points in time.

Using the confusion over blueprint or reality as the thrust of the argument against strong AI doesn't seem to me to adress the point strong AI proponents are making.

Oy veh, what a good, hard discussion! Thanks!

Vergil: The "something more" I'm pointing at isn't some elan vital or pixie dust. It's flesh. Complexity isn't enough because then life/thought would simply be a pattern that could be instantiated in anything. We can find those complex patterns anywhere if we choose to: the M&Ms in a bin, the swirling of dust, the way hail bounces or doesn't bounce. What we seem to know about consciousness is that it has to do with highly complex interactions in flesh. Those interactions aren't symbolic. They're causal.

To Paul: Even Descartes wasn't wrong about everything. (Could anyone be?) So, I was resorting to what I assumed would be a shared position with Claus: We can at least agree that we ourselves are conscious. I certainly agree with you that consciousness as we know it is an emergent property of groups (I spend too much time getting beaten up for saying this), although I'd also count as conscious someone brought up in complete isolation; I'm not sure that that such a person would in fact be what we mean by a "person," but that that's a different (and important) question.

Claus: We are talking about the same thing different ways, and are genuinely disagreeing. I think. I understood that you meant that the Kurzweil PC would be physicall plugged in to optical scanners, etc. But from my point of view, those digital senses are still producing symbolic info: the CCD is generating electrical impulses that get translated into some form of bits that the PC can understand. If, on the other hand, we take your second suggestion and nano-construct Kurzweil out of atoms, sort of like the Star Trek transporter, then I have no problem saying that that fleshy Ray is conscious and alive. Heck, you could even use DNA-based nanotech to grow a Ray from a fertilized egg...oh, wait, we do that already. :)

Now I feel left out. Did you find nothing to contradict in what I said, of was it too muddled or off-base even to try?

I don't get how a nano-bot synthetic organism is different than a computer simulation. Would it matter if it was running on a massively parallel machine with every neuron having a virtual
processor of it's own?

So, I've pulled Synergetics from the shelf and found the passage I refered to (pg. xxx):

The supposed location of the threshold between animate and inanimate was methodically narrowed down by experimental science until it was confined specifically within the domain of virology. Virologists have been too busy, for instance, with their DNA-RNA genitic code isolatings to find time to see the synergetic significance to society of the fact that they have found that no physical threshold does in fact exist between animate and inanimate. The possibility of its existence vanished because the supposedly unique physical qualities of both animate and inanimate have persisted right across yesterday's supposed threshold in both direction to permeate one another's -- previously percieved to be exclusive -- domains. Subsequently, what was animate has become foggier and foggier, and what is inanimate clearer and clearer. All organisms consist physically and in entirety of inherently inanimate atoms. The inanimate alone is not only omnipresent but is alone experimentally demonstrable. Belated news of the elimination of this threshold must be interpreted to mean that whatever life may be, it has not been isolated and thereby identified as residual in the biological cell, as had been supposed by the false assumption that there was a separate physical phenomenon called animate within which life existed. No life per se has been isolated. The threshold between animate and inanimate has vanished. These chemists who are preoccupied in synthesizing the particular atomically structured molecules identified as the prime constituents of humanly employed organisms will, even if they are chemically successful, be as remote from creating life as are the automobile manufacturers from creating the human drivers of their automobiles. Only the physical connections and development complexes of distinctly "nonlife" atoms into molecules, into cells, into animals, has been and will be discovered. The genetic coding of the design controls of organic systems offers no more explanation of life than did the specifications of the designs of the telephone system's apparatus and operations explain the nature of the life that communicates weightlessly to life over the only physically ponderable telephone system. Whatever else life may be, we know it is weightless. At the moment of death, no weight is lost. All the chemicals, including the chemist's life ingredients, are present, but life has vanished. The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out the endeavors to understand.

Hmmm. Seems to support the no strong AI position more that the reverse. Well, I claim that artificial life may be possible as well, but like strong AI, it will require radically different techniques than anything we are yet familiar with. In this sense, I'm not as clearly optimistic as Kurzweil et al., because it will require a new kind of science that is not yet anticipated (not even by Wolfram).

Gerry, don't be mad. I pretty much agreed with what you said (in the msg before the one immediately above) and liked the way you said it, so I didn't want to quibble. But now I will, just to show I care :)

Dreyfus in "What Computers Can't Do" makes the point that because our consciousness is so formed by our experience of the world (better, by our being in the world), AI would need to learn the same way and it would take a lifetime. Spielberg's AI edges up the same point. This is akin to your point about how they're in the world. But I don't want to even admit that symbolic processors (computers) have experiences. We can transmute the signals from optical sensors so that they symbolically represent various parameters of light, but it's still all symbols: a string that reads "1110001010101010...n", for example, only symbolically represents a dim reddish patch of light. The same light that hits our retina and stimulates our nervous system isn't information and isn't a symbol. It's a cause.

Anyway, I think we're agreeing...

David:"What we seem to know about consciousness is that it has to do with highly complex interactions in flesh. Those interactions aren't symbolic. They're causal." I completely agree with you on this point. The very point I tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to convey is that consciousness is "highly complex interactions" . I agree that it is in the flesh (though I use the word biology instead of flesh). But by complexity, I don't just mean complex patterns, I mean complex interacting systems - eg like a biological one.

Where we differ is that I allow for the possibility that a computing system might possibily be constructed (eventually) which had sufficiently complex software interactions, including interactions with its environment, so that it might have to be considered conscious in some way. I don't see that saying it just "manipulates symbols" counts against the possibility. Just like, the way I see it, seeing the "information patterns" in a DNA molecule doesn't count against the cell it is in being alive. I put in "interactions with the environment" because if it isn't there, then all you have is patterns, not a working system (ie there are causal things going on, I suppose).

Gerry: I think you said basically the same thing when you commented "The error is ... to suggest that we won't eventually make some real progress with a deeper understanding of complex systems."

The quote from Synergetics is excellent - I will have to go find it and read it. Thanks.

One more glass of wine and I'll be agreeing with absolutley everyone! :)

Vergil, IMO there's certainly a possibility that we could discover or even create conscious life forms that are not carbon-based. They might even be silicon-based. But they won't be computers, i.e., sets of on-off switches that symbolically represent brain states. Why am I dogmatic about this? Because of the M&M example (as well as Searle's Chinese Room and other such examples). It doesn't matter how complex the symbol manipulation is. The M&M example already stipulates a complexity precisely equivalent to that of our own brain. The M&Ms remain only symbols.

To put this differently, the brain doesn't have software. It certainly is constrained by the laws of science and we someday will know everything there is to know about how the brain works. But representing that description symbolically in a computer won't make the computer conscious because bits are only symbols just as M&Ms can be taken as symbols.

Just when I think we are actually agreeing ... As you might guess, thinking about this problem has been a hobby of mine for a long time. I've read some Dreyfus while I was a student in Flores' program (ODC), and I think that is a big part of his (Flores') philosophical grounding on this. Truthfully, I didn't really get it (Dreyfus), which I tend to interpret as the author being incomprehensible. I'll return to this disagreement after a digression about complexity.

Wolfram is basically making these two conjectures:

1) Formal (i.e. digital) systems can exhibit on a very limited set of complexity classes, simple ones (static, periodic, recursive) that are easy to characterize, and complex ones (the rest), and all systems capable of reaching the complex class are equivalent.

2) Relaxing the "formal" constraint from 1) doesn't really change anything (i.e. add new complexity classes, etc.).

I suspect that 1) is wrong, but I'm not enough of a mathematitian to even approach the problem. I read a book all about infinities and orders of infinity once, and trying to tease out the levels of complexity seems like a very similar problem. From the explainations in this book, it seemed that the orders of infinity were similarly limited, although some of the problems were not fully decided. You have finite (static), countable infinity (periodic), uncountable (recursive) and everything (refered to as "absolute" infinity). Between uncountable and absolute was a wide gulf and they seemed to have proved there were sets in that gulf, but they were very difficult to characterize.

Looking at the natural world for suggestions about levels of complexity, the computationally equivalent complexity is fully present in the biological processes of living organisms, but I don't think this is enough to explain survival, reproduction and evolution. Unlike the application of the anthropic principle in cosmology, in biology it is obvious that we don't see all the failed experiments. Computation and complexity without a fully functioning genetic system are interesting, but they depend upon the conditions that created them to recur, and so they have no way to accumulate complexity or structure (cause is completely external). Add genetics, and away you go to a whole new level of complexity.

It is human semiotic technology that allows for a new level of evolutionary system in culture. Animals can be social, but they can't change the way they relate without a shift in genetics or environment (again external). Even more flexibility is gained from our ability to self-consciously examine the results of our cultural development, but this (consciousness) is not a necessary condition for cultural evolution.

Because each of these levels must be stacked upon the lower levels, it is suggestive that with each step new classes of behavior emerge that are not present or possible before. To me, this is extremely suggestive that the first conjecture above is wrong.

Back to the strong AI debate. The confusion of Searle and others who think like this is that present computer systems only reach the first level of complexity, and current software practice requires teams of skilled technicians to externally provide the conditions that keep the systems running. Strong AI requires at least the next level of complexity, if not several (depending on how you map the levels).

The important thing to understand here is that nothing has changed in terms of the complexity level at the level of operations, but there is a big change in the way the system state is maintained and evolved (i.e. no more technicians always tweeking things). I see no reason to exclude the possibility that the underlying computing substrate is no different in principle from modern computers (Turing equivalent al the way). Biologically, the brain and mind make do within the constraints of natural evolution, so the ability to read out brain states or even being precisely digital isn't going to be selected for. With a synthetic substrate, it could be designed for that from the start, and so like Star Trek's Data, you could reload your artificial brain from the protected backups should that become necessary.

I may write some more in my blog about the levels and some other loose ends, but this has gotten very long already for a comment.

David, I hope you don't mind that I jump back in....

You should have pulled the physical/causal vs symbolic distinction in at the very beginning - I think this is a much better way of putting your objection than the ability to reinterpret symbols(and if you say that in your understanding of these terms the two objections are one and the same, then fine - that's just me not following your logic)

Let's follow your objection for a moment and dispense with the notion that the simulated Ray and the actual Ray are 'the same thing'. That would not eliminate the physical configuration of the simulated Ray - and the impulses hitting the sensory boundary of the apparatus that I erroneously referred to as being the same thing as Ray would presumably be a much a cause of the physical state of the machine as the light hitting Ray is a cause of the physical state of Ray.
The insistence on the distinction between equivalence and identity (which is what your objection amounts to as far as I can tell) and the insistence that the notion of consciousness is tied completely to the notion of identity and does not travel by equivalence may well be important. But does it leave any room for reasoning about the consciousness of machines at all?
Obviously elmininationg the ability to reason about consciousness is not the same thing as proving that consciousness it not present.

Gerry: Your comments about evolution and complexity match closely Kurzweil's criticism of Wolfram in Kurzweil's excellent review of Wolfram's book. I think K is exactly right...in this case. But I still don't buy that complexity, no matter how complex, is enough to create consciousness. The brain isn't a computer. It doesn't have software any more than a pool table does.

Claus: I'm not entirely clear that I'm saying what you say I'm saying wrt identity and equivalence. It seems to me that machines can be conscious especially since it's plausible to construe humans as machines. But I don't see how symbol processors could be because (roughly as Searle puts it) the symbols only have meaning extrinsically: they need us to *take* the bits, voltages, M&Ms as symbols. OTOH, we can of course learn much about the brain and mind by running computer models, just as we can learn about the weather or fluid dynamics. IMO.

I still think Searle's argument is misleading - ie symbol processors just process symbols, therefore no matter how complex they are, they can never "understand" (or be conscious).

I could trace the path of a photon falling on a cells in the back of your eye, measure the electrical potentials generated along the neurons, trace their path along the neurons and synapses. ( I could probably map it all out and represent it with 0's and 1's, but that isn't essential). If I then said vision was "nothing more" than a series of electrochemical reactions caused by electromagnetic energy impinging on certain types of cells which are transformed into a series of complex patterns in the neuronal cells of the brain - then I might have an understanding of how vision works, but would it explain my experience of "seeing red". [Chalmers steps in here and says no, we need an extra fundamental physical force].

However, if I keep probing deeper into how this all works, I think I would get to some level where the explanation is quite robotic. I mean something like finding a descrition of some chemical reaction at this point, which causes some other chemical reaction over here and so on and so forth - the point being it will be quite deterministic at that level of description.

For me, Searle's argument, if applied here, would be equivalent to saying that since at a very base level of, say, chemical reactions, the explanation of vision is deterministic, then there is no way that you can explain the experience of redness or conscious experience - its all just chemical reactions, and there is no room for conscious experience. (But we know we have conscious experience, so we'd better look for something else).

That's what it sound like to me when you say the symbol processors could never create consciousness. It is not so much the symbols, it is the fact that computers are so deterministic (symbols, 0's &1's, a program, written in symbols, doing only what you've thought of in the first place). But I think that sufficiently complex symbol processors, could in principle be designed to be conscious if they were of sufficiently complex design, even though the basics are deterministic, the complexity creates the "emergence" of non-determintistic behaviour.

I'm sure we are a very long way from it, but the symbols and the programming in the computer are like the "deterministic reactions" that might exist deep inside our cell structures, and the Immensely complex subsystems and systems that they make up in the body - which despite being deterministic at a very low level, still manage to produce consciousness.

Re-reading this, I'm not sure I've been very clear, but that's the best I can do for the moment.

But I still don't buy that complexity, no matter how complex, is enough to create consciousness. The brain isn't a computer. It doesn't have software any more than a pool table does.

Exactly, the brain is not a computer, and it evolved in a context that not only doesn't value extracting or copying brain states, but is probably antagonistic to this. The missing levels of complexity are exactly the ones that are important for being-in-the-world in a deep sense that can lead to self-consciousness. So if I meet an AI one day, I expect that intelligence to be quite different than mine, but I will not object when it tells me it is self-aware.

BTW, modern self-consciousness as we know and experience it may in fact be more of a cultural artifact than a property of the biological brain. Whether you accept the scholarship or not, Julian Janes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind provides a lot of interesting linquistic evidence for this idea. Worth reading even if he is completely wrong.

I did write a bit more about some issues from my last comment. People following this thread to this point would probably find it interesting.

David, I think you are saying what I say you are - and your 'pool table' short version of the argument underlines my point.
The flip side of the argument that *we* construct the symbolic computer (and that it therefore is arbitrary) is that the reality of the simulating hardware is not dependent on our symbolic understanding of it.
What I understand your argument to mean is that consciousness is an aspect of this reality and not of any model of it.
But that then means that your position (and maybe Searle's) isn't really a position about the possiblity of AI, but rather a statement that you don't accept the AI proponents criteria for establishing *when* something is conscious.
What I'm curious about is what avenues of reasoning about consciousness this leaves. If the position is that you cannot reason about consciousness but only experience it, then I can understand that, but again I don't think that actually says anything about the possibility of consciousness.

Claus, thanks for the explanation.

I believe your second paragraph is subject to the Chinese Room criticism. There are already hw systems that are as complex as the set of brain events that constitute Kurzweil tasting a peach (or whatever). There are certainly clusters of molecules and likely clusters of space objects that replicate those patterns. And there may even be M&Ms somewhere that does that. The replication of patterns doesn't constitute thought. A computer's replication of a pattern isn't any different just because we take it as different or intend it to be different, because my noticing that the molecules in a cloud of gas replicates Kurzweil's brain state can't suddenly turn that cloud into consciousness.

As to how we might recognize consciousness: I don't know. It's a really hard question and I am open to the possibility that we will fail to recognize conscious systems and that we will be fooled by non-conscious systems.

David, thanks for your patience. It it so nice to know *precisely* what one disagrees with...

A final clarification: In my description above 'construct' means 'mentally construct', i.e. 'symbolically understand'.

I'm taking my position to my own blog, and just want to leave a sound bite, that you prpbably disagree with:

"The important thing to notice is however that Weinberger (and Searle) are actually not saying anything about the consciousness of the physical system performing the simulation, but are only dismissing the argument that it is conscious by virtue of being a simulation of a conscious system.
In short, the objection made to strong AI is what Imre Lakatos calls 'local' - an objection to part of an argument in defense of a thesis, not 'global' - an objection to the proposed thesis itself."

David, since you asked:

The arbitrary act of interpretation that you use to argue that the M&M's bin or the simulated Ray is not conscious applies to our (symbolic) understanding of anything. If we were able to assert that there was a symbolic interpretation of the simulated Ray, and an interpretation of the actual Ray that had equality, then your counterargument (that we may choose another interpretation of the simulated Ray that destroys the equality) applies to *either* of these interpretations. You can alter your interpretation of the simulated Ray *or* of the actual Ray to break the equality.

So it seems to me that what your argument proves is not non-consciousness, but rather that this act of interpretation has no *influence* on the consciousness of the simulated Ray or the actual Ray. Since you would be able to argue in the same way about either of them. The equality of symbolic interpretation can be destroyed at either end and the relationship between them is symmetric. You cannot choose one symbolic interpretation as the 'arbitrary' one and the other as the 'real' one (which was the meaning of my first comment).

So the argument works by asserting that consciousness is not an idea about us but rather a fact about our reality and this reality is present before any interpretation of it. Consciousness is not a logically provable assertion.
Note, I am not saying that there isn't more to your position, but this is the only fact about consciousness that you use in your argument.
I understand that you mean the bin of M&M's as an example of something that is not conscious a priori - but that does not really change my position: Your argument would work regardless of the simulating substrate (which was the point of the 'series of simulating substances' posts I made). If we replace the candy bin with a Ray simulation in another body then the 'equality of Rays' is as arbitrary as it was for the candy bin. And as a consequence your argument does not really say anything about the consciousness of the simulating substrate. It's just that you have chosen as example a non-conscious substrate.

I think this objection to the generality of your argument applies to the chinese room argument as well.

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