Andrés Gómez Emilsson | Digital Sentience: Can Digital Computers Ever "Wake Up"? @/Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson | Uploaded June 2021 | Updated October 2024, 13 hours ago.
I start by acknowledging that most smart and well-informed people today believe that digital computers can be conscious. More so, they believe this for good reasons.
In general, 99.99% of the times when someone says that digital computers cannot be conscious they do so equipped with very bad arguments. This, of course, does not mean that all of these smart people who believe in digital sentience are right. In fact, I argue that they are making a critical yet entirely non-obvious mistake: they are not taking into account a sufficiently detailed set of constraints that any scientific theory of consciousness must satisfy. In this video I go over what those constraints are, and in what way they actually entail that digital sentience is literally impossible.
The talk is divided into three parts: (1) my philosophical journey, which I share in order to establish credibility, (2) classic issues in philosophy of mind, and (3) how we can solve all those issues with QRI's theory of consciousness.
(Skip to 31:00 if you are not interested in my philosophical journey and you want to jump into the philosophy of mind right away).
(1) I've been hyper-philosophical all my life and have dedicated thousands of hours working on this topic: having discussions with people in the field, writings essays, studying qualia in all manners of exotic states of consciousness, and working through the implications of different philosophical background assumptions. I claim that QRI's views here are indeed much more informed than anyone would assume if they just heard that we think digital computers cannot be conscious. In fact, most of us started out as hard-core computationalists and only switched sides once we fully grokked the limitations of that view! Until the age of 20 I was a huge proponent of digital sentience, and I planned my life around that very issue. So it was a big blow to find out that I was neglecting key pieces of the puzzle that David Pearce, and later Mike Johnson, brought up when I met them in person. In particular, they made me aware of the importance of the "phenomenal binding/boundary problem"; once I finally understood it, everything unraveled from there.
(2) We go over: Marr's levels of analysis (and "interactions between levels"). The difference between functionalism, computationalism, causal structure, and physicalist theories of consciousness. The Chinese Room. Multiple Realizability. Epiphenomenalism. Why synchrony is not enough for binding. Multiple Drafts Theory of consciousness. And the difference between awareness and attention.
(3) We solve the boundary problem with topological segmentation: this allows us to also provide an explanation for what the causal properties of experience are. The integrated nature of fields can be recruited for computation. Topological boundaries are neither epiphenomenal nor frame-dependent. Thus, evolution stumbling upon holistic field behavior of topological pockets of the fields of physics would solve a lot of puzzles in philosophy of mind. In turn, since digital computers don't use fields of physics for computation, they will never be unified subjects of experience no matter how you program them.
I also discuss issues with IIT's solution to the binding problem (despite IIT's whole aesthetic of irreducible causality, their solution makes binding epiphenomenal! The devil's in the details: IIT says the Minimum Information Partition has "the highest claim of existence" but this leaves all non-minimal partitions untouched. It's epiphenomenal and thus not actually useful for computation).
Thanks also to Andrew Zuckerman and other QRI folks for great recent discussions on this topic.
~Qualia of the Day: Dennett's Intentional Stance~
--------------------------------------------------------
Relevant links and references:
Qualia Research Institute Glossary - qualiaresearchinstitute.org/glossary
Breaking Down the Problem of Consciousness - qualiacomputing.com/2019/11/22/breaking-down-the-problem-of-consciousness
A Debate on Animal Consciousness (it's almost like a "Who's Who" of the rationalist community and what they believe about consciousness) - rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness
Integrating information in the brain’s EM field: the CEMI field theory of consciousness by Johnjoe McFadden - academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853
Against Functionalism by Michael Johnson - opentheory.net/2017/07/why-i-think-the-foundational-research-institute-should-rethink-its-approach
Principia Qualia by Michael Johnson - opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf
Are Brains Analogue or Digital? | Prof Freeman Dyson - youtu.be/JLT6omWrvIw
Welcoming Steven Lehar as a QRI Lineage
- qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/steven-lehar-lineage
Humans and Intelligent Machines: Co-Evolution, Fusion or Replacement? by David Pearce - biointelligence-explosion.com/parable.html
I start by acknowledging that most smart and well-informed people today believe that digital computers can be conscious. More so, they believe this for good reasons.
In general, 99.99% of the times when someone says that digital computers cannot be conscious they do so equipped with very bad arguments. This, of course, does not mean that all of these smart people who believe in digital sentience are right. In fact, I argue that they are making a critical yet entirely non-obvious mistake: they are not taking into account a sufficiently detailed set of constraints that any scientific theory of consciousness must satisfy. In this video I go over what those constraints are, and in what way they actually entail that digital sentience is literally impossible.
The talk is divided into three parts: (1) my philosophical journey, which I share in order to establish credibility, (2) classic issues in philosophy of mind, and (3) how we can solve all those issues with QRI's theory of consciousness.
(Skip to 31:00 if you are not interested in my philosophical journey and you want to jump into the philosophy of mind right away).
(1) I've been hyper-philosophical all my life and have dedicated thousands of hours working on this topic: having discussions with people in the field, writings essays, studying qualia in all manners of exotic states of consciousness, and working through the implications of different philosophical background assumptions. I claim that QRI's views here are indeed much more informed than anyone would assume if they just heard that we think digital computers cannot be conscious. In fact, most of us started out as hard-core computationalists and only switched sides once we fully grokked the limitations of that view! Until the age of 20 I was a huge proponent of digital sentience, and I planned my life around that very issue. So it was a big blow to find out that I was neglecting key pieces of the puzzle that David Pearce, and later Mike Johnson, brought up when I met them in person. In particular, they made me aware of the importance of the "phenomenal binding/boundary problem"; once I finally understood it, everything unraveled from there.
(2) We go over: Marr's levels of analysis (and "interactions between levels"). The difference between functionalism, computationalism, causal structure, and physicalist theories of consciousness. The Chinese Room. Multiple Realizability. Epiphenomenalism. Why synchrony is not enough for binding. Multiple Drafts Theory of consciousness. And the difference between awareness and attention.
(3) We solve the boundary problem with topological segmentation: this allows us to also provide an explanation for what the causal properties of experience are. The integrated nature of fields can be recruited for computation. Topological boundaries are neither epiphenomenal nor frame-dependent. Thus, evolution stumbling upon holistic field behavior of topological pockets of the fields of physics would solve a lot of puzzles in philosophy of mind. In turn, since digital computers don't use fields of physics for computation, they will never be unified subjects of experience no matter how you program them.
I also discuss issues with IIT's solution to the binding problem (despite IIT's whole aesthetic of irreducible causality, their solution makes binding epiphenomenal! The devil's in the details: IIT says the Minimum Information Partition has "the highest claim of existence" but this leaves all non-minimal partitions untouched. It's epiphenomenal and thus not actually useful for computation).
Thanks also to Andrew Zuckerman and other QRI folks for great recent discussions on this topic.
~Qualia of the Day: Dennett's Intentional Stance~
--------------------------------------------------------
Relevant links and references:
Qualia Research Institute Glossary - qualiaresearchinstitute.org/glossary
Breaking Down the Problem of Consciousness - qualiacomputing.com/2019/11/22/breaking-down-the-problem-of-consciousness
A Debate on Animal Consciousness (it's almost like a "Who's Who" of the rationalist community and what they believe about consciousness) - rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness
Integrating information in the brain’s EM field: the CEMI field theory of consciousness by Johnjoe McFadden - academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853
Against Functionalism by Michael Johnson - opentheory.net/2017/07/why-i-think-the-foundational-research-institute-should-rethink-its-approach
Principia Qualia by Michael Johnson - opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf
Are Brains Analogue or Digital? | Prof Freeman Dyson - youtu.be/JLT6omWrvIw
Welcoming Steven Lehar as a QRI Lineage
- qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/steven-lehar-lineage
Humans and Intelligent Machines: Co-Evolution, Fusion or Replacement? by David Pearce - biointelligence-explosion.com/parable.html
