That was a very long comment (thank you for your effort) and I don’t think I have the energy to exhaustively go through it.
I believe I follow what you’re saying. It doesn’t make much sense to me, so maybe that belief is false.
I think the fact that if you start with a brain, which is presumably conscious, and zoom in all the way looking for the conciousness boundary, and then start with a quark, which is presumably not conscious, and zoom all the way out to the entire brain, also without finding a consciousness barrier—I think this means that the best we can do at the moment is set upper and lower bounds.
A minimally conscious system—say, something that can convince me that it thinks it is conscious. “echo ‘I’m conscious!’” doesn’t quite cut it, things that recognize themselves in mirrors probably do, and I could go either way on the stuff in between.
I think your reductionism is a little misapplied. My pi-calculating program develops a new property of pi-computation when you put the adders and multipliers together right, but is completely described in terms of adders and multipliers. I expect consciousness to be exactly the same; it’ll be completely described in terms of qualia generating algorithms (or some such), which won’t themselves have the consciousness property.
This is hard to see because the algorithms are written in spaghetti code, in the wiring between neurons. In computer terms, we have access to the I/O system and all the gates in the CPU, but we don’t currently know how they’re connected. Looking at more or fewer of the gates doesn’t help, because the critical piece of information is how they’re connected and what algorithm they implement.
IMO, my guess (P=.65) is that qualia are going to turn out to be something like vectors in a feature space. Under this model, clearly systems incapable of representing such a vector can’t have any qualia at all. Rocks and single molecules, for example.
That was a very long comment (thank you for your effort) and I don’t think I have the energy to exhaustively go through it.
I believe I follow what you’re saying. It doesn’t make much sense to me, so maybe that belief is false.
I think the fact that if you start with a brain, which is presumably conscious, and zoom in all the way looking for the conciousness boundary, and then start with a quark, which is presumably not conscious, and zoom all the way out to the entire brain, also without finding a consciousness barrier—I think this means that the best we can do at the moment is set upper and lower bounds.
A minimally conscious system—say, something that can convince me that it thinks it is conscious. “echo ‘I’m conscious!’” doesn’t quite cut it, things that recognize themselves in mirrors probably do, and I could go either way on the stuff in between.
I think your reductionism is a little misapplied. My pi-calculating program develops a new property of pi-computation when you put the adders and multipliers together right, but is completely described in terms of adders and multipliers. I expect consciousness to be exactly the same; it’ll be completely described in terms of qualia generating algorithms (or some such), which won’t themselves have the consciousness property.
This is hard to see because the algorithms are written in spaghetti code, in the wiring between neurons. In computer terms, we have access to the I/O system and all the gates in the CPU, but we don’t currently know how they’re connected. Looking at more or fewer of the gates doesn’t help, because the critical piece of information is how they’re connected and what algorithm they implement.
IMO, my guess (P=.65) is that qualia are going to turn out to be something like vectors in a feature space. Under this model, clearly systems incapable of representing such a vector can’t have any qualia at all. Rocks and single molecules, for example.