In defense of David’s point, consciousness research is currently pre-scientific, loosely akin to 1400’s alchemy. Fields become scientific as they settle on a core ontology and methodology for generating predictions from this ontology; consciousness research presently has neither.
Most current arguments about consciousness and uploading are thus ultimately arguments by intuition. Certainly an intuitive story can be told why uploading a brain and running it as a computer program would also simply transfer consciousness, but we can also tell stories where intuition pulls in the opposite direction, e.g. see Scott Aaronson’s piece here https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1951 ; my former colleague Andres also has a relevant paper arguing against computationalist approaches here https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2022-0225/html
Of the attempts to formalize the concept of information flows and its relevance to consciousness, the most notable is probably Tononi’s IIT (currently on version 4.0). However, Tononi himself believes computers could be only minimally conscious and only in a highly fragmented way, for technical reasons relating to his theory. Excerpted from Principia Qualia:
>Tononi has argued that “in sharp contrast to widespread functionalist beliefs, IIT implies that digital computers, even if their behaviour were to be functionally equivalent to ours, and even if they were to run faithful simulations of the human brain, would experience next to nothing” (Tononi and Koch 2015). However, he hasn’t actually published much on why he thinks this. When pressed on this, he justified this assertion by reference to IIT’s axiom of exclusion – thi axiom effectively prevents ’double counting’ a physical element to be part of multiple virtual elements, and when he ran a simple neural simulation on a simple microprocessor and looked at what the hardware was actually doing, a lot of the “virtual neurons” were being run on the same logic gates (in particular, all virtual neurons extensively share the logic gates which run the processor clock). Thus, the virtual neurons don’t exist in the same causal clump (“cause-effect repertoire”) like they do in a real brain. His conclusion was that there might be small fragments of consciousness scattered around a digital computer, but he’s confident that ‘virtual neurons’ emulated on a Von Neumann system wouldn’t produce their original qualia.
At any rate, there are many approaches to formalizing consciousness across the literature, each pointing to a slightly different set of implications for uploads, and no clear winner yet. I assign more probability mass than David or Tononi that computers generate nontrivial amounts of consciousness (see here https://opentheory.net/2022/12/ais-arent-conscious-but-computers-are/) but find David’s thesis entirely reasonable.
In defense of David’s point, consciousness research is currently pre-scientific, loosely akin to 1400’s alchemy. Fields become scientific as they settle on a core ontology and methodology for generating predictions from this ontology; consciousness research presently has neither.
Most current arguments about consciousness and uploading are thus ultimately arguments by intuition. Certainly an intuitive story can be told why uploading a brain and running it as a computer program would also simply transfer consciousness, but we can also tell stories where intuition pulls in the opposite direction, e.g. see Scott Aaronson’s piece here https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1951 ; my former colleague Andres also has a relevant paper arguing against computationalist approaches here https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2022-0225/html
Of the attempts to formalize the concept of information flows and its relevance to consciousness, the most notable is probably Tononi’s IIT (currently on version 4.0). However, Tononi himself believes computers could be only minimally conscious and only in a highly fragmented way, for technical reasons relating to his theory. Excerpted from Principia Qualia:
>Tononi has argued that “in sharp contrast to widespread functionalist beliefs, IIT implies that digital computers, even if their behaviour were to be functionally equivalent to ours, and even if they were to run faithful simulations of the human brain, would experience next to nothing” (Tononi and Koch 2015). However, he hasn’t actually published much on why he thinks this. When pressed on this, he justified this assertion by reference to IIT’s axiom of exclusion – thi axiom effectively prevents ’double counting’ a physical element to be part of multiple virtual elements, and when he ran a simple neural simulation on a simple microprocessor and looked at what the hardware was actually doing, a lot of the “virtual neurons” were being run on the same logic gates (in particular, all virtual neurons extensively share the logic gates which run the processor clock). Thus, the virtual neurons don’t exist in the same causal clump (“cause-effect repertoire”) like they do in a real brain. His conclusion was that there might be small fragments of consciousness scattered around a digital computer, but he’s confident that ‘virtual neurons’ emulated on a Von Neumann system wouldn’t produce their original qualia.
At any rate, there are many approaches to formalizing consciousness across the literature, each pointing to a slightly different set of implications for uploads, and no clear winner yet. I assign more probability mass than David or Tononi that computers generate nontrivial amounts of consciousness (see here https://opentheory.net/2022/12/ais-arent-conscious-but-computers-are/) but find David’s thesis entirely reasonable.