Whatever it is that’s conscious, you can compute it and represent it in a static form. The simplest interpretation is that the output itself is conscious. So this leads to the conclusion that, if a Turing machine computes consciousness and summarizes its output in a static representation on a tape, the tape is conscious.
I don’t see the contradiction here, although the sheer scale might be throwing off intuition. I’m perfectly willing to say that if you actually had such a tape, it would be conscious. Needless to say, the tape would be inconceivably huge if you really wanted to represent the astronomical amount of inputs and outputs that make up something we would call “conscious.”
Let’s see—the retina absorbs roughly 10^7 bits/second, say you had to simulate just a day of possible input, that gives at least 2^1000000000 possible input/output combinations.
There is ‘possible in theory’ and ‘possible in any multiverse remotely similar to ours’. I tend to favor the 2nd usage of the world ‘possible’.
Since the algorithm can be compressed well (it fits into a human brain), and since that form of the algorithm takes its input a few bits at a time (and not a day’s worth in a single go), it seems likely that a fully static representation can also be highly compressed and would not need to take the full 2^(10^7) bits. Especially so if you allow the algorithm to be slightly imprecise in its output.
Jacob was drastically oversimplifying, because the algorithm (assuming we restrict ourselves to responses to visual stimuli) does not convert one retinal image to some particular, constant output; a conscious being would never respond in the same way to the same image all the time.
Instead, it converts one input brain state plus one retinal image to one output brain state, and brain states consist of a similarly enormous amount of information.
I don’t see the contradiction here, although the sheer scale might be throwing off intuition. I’m perfectly willing to say that if you actually had such a tape, it would be conscious. Needless to say, the tape would be inconceivably huge if you really wanted to represent the astronomical amount of inputs and outputs that make up something we would call “conscious.”
Let’s see—the retina absorbs roughly 10^7 bits/second, say you had to simulate just a day of possible input, that gives at least 2^1000000000 possible input/output combinations.
There is ‘possible in theory’ and ‘possible in any multiverse remotely similar to ours’. I tend to favor the 2nd usage of the world ‘possible’.
Since the algorithm can be compressed well (it fits into a human brain), and since that form of the algorithm takes its input a few bits at a time (and not a day’s worth in a single go), it seems likely that a fully static representation can also be highly compressed and would not need to take the full 2^(10^7) bits. Especially so if you allow the algorithm to be slightly imprecise in its output.
Jacob was drastically oversimplifying, because the algorithm (assuming we restrict ourselves to responses to visual stimuli) does not convert one retinal image to some particular, constant output; a conscious being would never respond in the same way to the same image all the time.
Instead, it converts one input brain state plus one retinal image to one output brain state, and brain states consist of a similarly enormous amount of information.
Perhaps the difference between succeeding brain states, induced by visual input, isn’t all that enormous.