The “cognition is computation” hypothesis remains mysterious. How granular do the time steps have to be in my sim before someone starts feeling something? Do I have to run the sim forward at planck intervals in order to produce qualitative experience? Milliseconds? Minutes? Can you run the simulation backwards and get spooky inverse emotions or avoid qualia entirely that way?
That sounds more like “cognition is mysterious”, regardless of computation substrate. How do you think these things work in the brain? How many neurons or neural connections are needed to feel something? If you chemically speed up or slow down the signal propagation, is that still viable?
The answer is: we don’t know. The precise constraints and effects have not been tested, nor even explored enough to hypothesize. However, we DO know that a chemical processor in human heads has cognition (or at least mine does; I don’t want to overreach and assume yours or others’), and it’s very difficult to see why a digital computation COULDN’T have the same.
That’s not to say it’s automatic, nor that all computations are conscious. That part is unknown. Possibly unknowable (given I can’t even prove your consciousness to myself).
The “cognition is computation” hypothesis remains mysterious. How granular do the time steps have to be in my sim before someone starts feeling something? Do I have to run the sim forward at planck intervals in order to produce qualitative experience? Milliseconds? Minutes? Can you run the simulation backwards and get spooky inverse emotions or avoid qualia entirely that way?
That sounds more like “cognition is mysterious”, regardless of computation substrate. How do you think these things work in the brain? How many neurons or neural connections are needed to feel something? If you chemically speed up or slow down the signal propagation, is that still viable?
The answer is: we don’t know. The precise constraints and effects have not been tested, nor even explored enough to hypothesize. However, we DO know that a chemical processor in human heads has cognition (or at least mine does; I don’t want to overreach and assume yours or others’), and it’s very difficult to see why a digital computation COULDN’T have the same.
That’s not to say it’s automatic, nor that all computations are conscious. That part is unknown. Possibly unknowable (given I can’t even prove your consciousness to myself).