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[Bauglir]

-snip-

Okay, let me ask you a question here - is your web browser physically located somewhere on your computer? I ask because you haven't shown that this analogy isn't applicable, you just keep claiming it isn't.

Okay, sure, ontological monism, it's not compatible with - I don't even think minds are atomic. And what sledgehammer-like experiments we've managed to do (for example) support that view, since minds can do things like adjust to having an extra arm output jammed in. In fact, I don't think monism is at all compatible with the idea that minds are systems - a mind, as far as I can tell, is information, and stored in the arrangement and function of its component matter. It is not the matter itself, which is why I don't think I become a little less "me" as atoms cycle through me over the course of my lifecycle.

It's not at all incompatible with scientific naturalism, though. I'm not positing something existing outside the rules of nature. I'm saying that what I understand "me" to refer to is an information management system governed by natural law, and in particular one that runs on one particular brain.

EDIT: I guess the argument holds if you argue that the idea of ascribing importance to the arrangement of matter is incoherent, you can do that, but that seems pretty absurd. I like having shorthands like "chair" instead of "the particular collection of particles with <list of properties> currently hurtling toward your <collection of particles comprising your skull, equally expressed through a list of properties>", if absolutely nothing else. It takes less than the lifetime of the universe to say.

[LordBucket]

Your 'software' is not 'linked' to your 'hardware' because there is no such distinction. There is neither 'software' nor 'hardware' – there is only brain.

That's a metaphysical statement of faith you're making. Yes, people who assert the opposite are also making metaphysical claims. Nobody knows what consciousness is. Superficially clothing yourself in the garb of "I'm a science!" doesn't magically grant you credibility to make claims about a thing nobody knows what it is.

[Bauglir]

Oh, sure. I could certainly be wrong, I just haven't seen any actual refutations that prove it. That's all I mean to say.

[Bohandas]

EDIT: I guess the argument holds if you argue that the idea of ascribing importance to the arrangement of matter is incoherent, you can do that, but that seems pretty absurd. I like having shorthands like "chair" instead of "the particular collection of particles with <list of properties> currently hurtling toward your <collection of particles comprising your skull, equally expressed through a list of properties>", if absolutely nothing else. It takes less than the lifetime of the universe to say.

Fun fact:
The technical term for the idea described above is Mereological Nihilism.

EDIT:

[Bauglir]

Oh, hey, that'll save my internal monologue a lot of time on the subject. Obscure enough that it'll never prove useful in conversation, though. Thanks for the link, at any rate.

[Arx]

Oh, sure. I could certainly be wrong, I just haven't seen any actual refutations that prove it. That's all I mean to say.

Man, I'm having religion thread flashbacks. Not you specifically Bauglir, but this whole argument.

[TempAcc]

Well, anytime people argue about things that have no verified scientific proof, it kinda turns into metaphysical arguments that are mostly based on faith or selective optimism.
Like Ispill and LordBucket said, the only difference here is that people are using way more philosophical terms and calling it "science" and "systems" rather than "religion" and "faith", so the argument tends to last longer until someone decides to get edgy about it :v

Anyway, on topic: the major problem with such propositions is that we still don't know what the hell counciousness is. We do know that altering the physical structure of the brain can cause massive deviations in a person's feelings, memories, personality and intelligence, and we have a rather vague idea of what physical part of the brain does what, but we don't know exactly how these processes happen, where they begin and how they end, or if the peculiar state of brain cells has anything to do with it (generally incapable of regenerating, unique chemical interactions, etc).

A good first step would be to perfectly emulate the complete structure of a brain and then try to stimulate it and see what happens, but we don't have the technology do reasonably do that just yet.

[Bauglir]

Oh, sure. I could certainly be wrong, I just haven't seen any actual refutations that prove it. That's all I mean to say.

Man, I'm having religion thread flashbacks. Not you specifically Bauglir, but this whole argument.

Heh, you're not wrong. This isn't that different. I try not to take these things too seriously anymore, but I actually really do want to see this refutation. I'm not too hung up on proving myself right, I'm just trying to be clear about what I believe and why so that there's a very clear target to demolish.

To summarize: I believe that there's a hardware/software analogy. I believe minds are a naturally-occurring analogue to software. Because hardware and software demonstrably exist in reality, to the extent that anything can be said to, appeals to natural law or ontology are unlikely to work well - a good refutation would most likely demonstrate that the analogy is impossible in the specific case of minds. That said, it's not my place to dictate the terms of somebody else's argument. That's more my expectation than an instruction.

[wierd]

Food for thought:

There exists a kind of programmable microchip, called an FPGA.  It is little more than a whole bunch of logic gates on a silicon substrate, that can be flipped on and off, to create a simulation of nearly any other kind of chip, on the fly. The most frequent use case is for testing CPU designs. Thus, the very same FPGA can go from being a DSP, to being a GPU, to being a CPU, just with a little extra "software."  The resulting simulation is not emulation; the logic gates in the FPGA are given a configuration that is identical to the gate layout that would be inside those chips, and then it "Simply does" those things. 

Why is this relavent?

Recent research suggests that memories are not stored in the synapes between neurons, but rather inside the neurons themselves.

EG, each individual neuron develops and retains a small datastore, and a processing system. In other words, each individual neuron acts quite a bit like an FPGA. The way in which it fires, depends upon the configuration information it has stored inside it.

The argument that mind/body dualism is inappropriate, because the mind and the body (the brain) are inexorably linked, gets thrown a curveball by this.  It means that if we provide enough horsepower in each of our synthetic neurons to handle every possible state/configuration a biological neuron can handle, and have a reserve pool of such synthetic neurons on our neuron simulation chip sufficient to meet or exceed the expected rate of neurogenesis vs apoptosis, we can simulate a brain on silicon, without resorting to software emulation.

The resulting hardware would be more easily scalable by design, meaning we could then tweak some of the parameters to allow the active simulation to become larger/more complex than current wetware offerings, and we wouldnt be bogged down by the slowness of serial processing. (And in case you were wondering, each neuron would likely operate orders of magnitude faster than organic ones, since organic ones fire quite slowly.)  Ultimately, there would be a tradeoff, however. Synthetic collections of such "neurochips" (which are already becoming a thing, btw) will run into inter-chip communication issues, due to signal propogation delays that are inevitable. This means that even with synthetic components, there will be a tradeoff between total array size, and effective processing speeds. (Bigger arrays are harder to keep usefully synchronized, due to this propogation delay. Sorry, but there is no good solution to this problem-- it will persist even on purely optical computers, since the speed of light cannot be violated for information transfer.) That's fine though, since the increased native speeds of the synthetic neurons over their organic counterparts means that substantially larger arrays are theoretically possible.

Also, just a nitpick--- Not all computers are digital logic.  The earliest electronic computers were fully analog logic. Digital computers are simply easier to design and program, which is why we switched to them.


I fully expect that full sentience on artificial substrates will eventually become a thing, if humans keep doing what they are doing.

[Spehss _]

Food for thought:
-snip-

Well that's pretty neat. Sounds like it could be a big change-up to how science figured ai would be simulated. Rather than neural nets of software, it's neural nets of hardware loaded with software.

[Eagleon]

To summarize: I believe that there's a hardware/software analogy. I believe minds are a naturally-occurring analogue to software. Because hardware and software demonstrably exist in reality, to the extent that anything can be said to, appeals to natural law or ontology are unlikely to work well - a good refutation would most likely demonstrate that the analogy is impossible in the specific case of minds. That said, it's not my place to dictate the terms of somebody else's argument. That's more my expectation than an instruction.

I'm actually leaning more towards his argument, without the pointless Scientism - artificial neural networks (ANNs) exist in software, but actual neurons are very definitely not any kind of software we've learned to directly push onto hardware to process. Of course the hardware/software analogy can be pushed onto any kind of complex system - you could say that the hardware of a rock runs the software of the physics for when it's thrown. Whether or not that analogy is useful when we put it into practice by programming a rock is a different matter, and one that's very debatable for the incredibly fine structures of the brain, which involve not just neurons but glial cells that are currently an unknown factor in learning and memory, and the 30-100 chemical transmitters that bridge responses together, which are so poorly understood as to make pharmaceuticals affecting them resemble alchemy.

If you take the stance that I do on intelligence, you also have a sensory network that dwarfs the brain in complexity and importance. My understanding is that the only reason we're able to develop a brain like we have is that we have a highly developed sensory world rich enough to support its growth and response, something which is devastating to the brain if it's completely withdrawn or reduced (see sensory deprivation and its symptoms, sensory integration disorder for developmental problems from malformed integration) In reflection, it's something we need the equivalent of if we're going to create a reasonably powerful AI or acceptable replacement for our meat-bodies. It's had much more time to evolve, and is much more important to our survival, so it likely has a great deal of depth we haven't yet begun to understand (this, for instance, published just 6 years ago)

All of that contributes to your understanding of the world in ways that we can't yet approach using existing signal processing and sensor hardware. Neither is being worked on actively at the physical scales required for a human-sized embodiment to be viable, prosthetics just don't yet need to be that good.

We can jump past that by making a set of replacements in hardware for all the structures involved. Does that mean that we understand it as software? No. Not until we can directly port it to run using a different architecture, or code one from scratch. We also couldn't copy it, or store it. All of the usual fantastical constructs of a singularity composed of simulated brains disappear when you have to keep things as they are for fear of breaking them. It's the difference between physically making a rocket engine, and being able to make something like Kerbal Space Program, which could not have possibly existed in the Apollo era. You wouldn't download a rocket engine...

[Loud Whispers]

That "we lose continuity when we sleep!" is bloody moronic. Seriously. Neurons still talk to each other, brains still function, Hell, people dream! The only way you can say something like that is by confusing consciousness with, well, being conscious. An easy mistake I'm sure, but they're not the same, not in my book at least :v

Yeah, so much so that you really notice when there are interruptions like with passing out

I can never tell with you, but since I would likely agree with that statement, I'm gonna guess that you're being cheeki and sarcastic.

Was being dead serious; the few times where I've passed out very quickly (like on a plane) and experienced consciousness as being continuous despite being three quarters of a day apart it was noticeably off, as opposed to dosing off to sleep

I'm not here to put words in LW's mouth. It's up to him if what I said is at all what he is saying.

That said, what is the difference? Why the emphasis on "believe"?

I think you've been confusing LB and LW
Inb5 we are the same consciousness

[wierd]

I can confirm this myself-- I was in a coma for several days when I was a child, following a pretty impressive concussion from being hit by a car. (it was totally my fault I got hit too.) I did not experience several days worth of dream memories during the time I was effectively "turned off".   In fact, I did not dream at all during that time.

Time seemed to be directly interrupted. My last memory before waking up, was being rushed through the hospital on the gurney, with 6 people in hairnets and facemasks looking down over me, trying to keep me conscious. *Blink*-- Now in a hospital bed, with sunlight coming in through the window. Lost several days worth of time. Just like that.

This experience is not universal however. There are situations where voluntary motor activity is not possible, but the afflicted person is otherwise fully conscious and aware of the environment. "Lock in" disorders of this nature are very difficult to tell apart from genuine loss of consciousness-- but they most certainly are NOT the same.

[wierd]

Still, in regard to "tech singularity" futurism--

Supposing that we can create a synthetic substrate that can perform full analogous processing to what an organic brain can do (and has some redundant hardware neurons that are normally inactive that can be promoted into service to simulate neurogenesis; this pool being where "dead" neurons go when the simulation culls them, creating a kind of runtime buffer for the simulated nervous system) and that this simulation has all of these features:

1) VASTLY faster runtime speed compared to organic neurons
2) More scalable topology means additional arrays can be installed, until signalling bottleneck is reached
3) This simulated brain is instructed on chip design as part of its education

then there exists SOME potential for "singularity like growth"-- however, short of some seriously whack science fiction, there is no realistic way to extract all of the state data out of each and every one of a human's neurons; this means that the singularity growth would only be possible for the synthetic substrate intelligences, since the synthetic substrate exposes this information easily.

In other words, the singularity will leave the humans behind.

[TempAcc]

I experienced something similar when I blacked out after staying awake for over 50 hours after a rather exceptionaly long car trip in my youth. Once I got the beach resort apartment, I remember not feeling sleepy, and trying to remain awake so I could watch a certain show. All I remember is that I was sitting in the couch watching tv and then poof, found myself fallen on the couch, got up and noticed around 5 hours had passed. I experienced absolutely no dreams. It was a continuous stream of consciousness, and to me there was no interruption between the two moments.

I tried as hard as I could to remember just how I blacked out, but I couldn't remember a thing. Asked my parents about it and they just told me they found me there, adjusted my body and didn't wake me up cause I looked really tired.