Thanks for the replies. I will try to answer and expand on the points raised. There are a number of reductio ad absurdums that dissuade me from machine functionalism, including Ned Block’s China brain and also the idea that a Turing machine running a human brain simulation would possess human consciousness. Let me try to take the absurdity to the next level with the following example:
Does an animated GIF possess human consciousness?
Imagine we record the activity of every neuron in a human brain at every millisecond; at each millisecond, we record whether each of the 100 billion neurons in the human brain is firing an action potental or not. We record all of this for a 1 second duration. Now, for each of the 1000 milliseconds, we represent the neural firing state of all neurons as a binary GIF image of about 333,000 pixels in height and width (this probably exceeds GIF format specifications, but who cares), where each pixel represents the firing state of a specific neuron. We can make 1000 of these GIFs for each millisecond over the 1 second duration. With these 1000 GIFs, we concatenate them to form an animated GIF and then play the animated GIF on an endless loop. Since we are now “simulating” the neural activities of all the neurons in the human brain, we might expect that the animated GIF possesses human consciousness… But this view is absurd and this exercise suggests there is more to consciousness than reproducing neural activities in different substrates.
To V_V, I don’t think it has human consciousness. If I answer otherwise, I’m pressed to acknowledge that well-coded chatbots have human consciousness, which is absurd. With regard to what “conscious” means in epistemic terms, I don’t know, but I do know that the Turing test is insufficient because it only deals with appearances and it’s easy to be duped. About updating posterior beliefs, I would have to know the basis for consciousness, which I acknowledge uncertainty over.
To Kyre, you hit the crux in your second example. The absurdity of China brain and the Turing machine with human consciousness stems from the fact that the causal structures (i.e., space-time diagrams) in these physical systems are completely different from the causal structure of the human brain. As you describe, in a typical computer there are honest-to-god physical cause and effect in the voltage levels in the memory gates, but the causal structure is completely different from wetware, and this is where the absurdity of attributing consciousness to computations (or simulation) comes from, at least for me. Consciousness is not just computational. Otherwise you have absurdities like China brain and animated GIFs with human consciousness. It seems more likely to be physico-computational, as reflected in the causal structure of interactions of the physical system which underlies the computations and simulations.
There may be a computer architecture that reproduces the correct causal structure, but Von Neumann and related architectures do not. And to your last question, yes! A simulation is just an image. If you think it is the real thing, then you must accept that an animated GIF can possess human consciousness. Personally, this conclusion is too absurd for me to accept.
To jacob_cannell, thanks for the congrats. Sure, consciousness has baggage but using self-awareness instead already commits one to consciousness as a special type of computation, which the reductio ad absurdums above try to disprove. I agree it’s likely that “Self-awareness is just a computational capability”, depending on what you mean by ‘Self’ and ‘awareness’. You state that “The ‘causal structure’ is just the key algorithmic computations” but this is not quite right. The algorithmic computations can be instantiated in many different causal structures but only some will resemble those of the human brain and presumably possess human consciousness.
TLDR: The basis of consciousness is very speculative and there is good reason to believe it goes beyond computation to the physico-computational and causal (space-time) structure.
Shawn Mikula here. Allow me to clear up the confusion that appears to have been caused by being quoted out of context. I clearly state in the part of my answer preceding the quoted text the following:
“2) assuming you can run accurate simulations of the mind based on these structural maps, are they conscious?”.
So this is not a question of misunderstanding universal computation and whether a computer simulation can mimic, for practical purposes, the computations of the brain. I am already assuming the computer simulation is mimicking the brain’s activity and computations. My point is that a computer works very differently from a brain which is evident in differences in its underlying causal structure. In other words, the coordinated activity of the binary logic gates underlying the computer running the simulation has a vastly different causal structure than the coordinated activity and massive parallelism of neurons in a brain.
The confusion appears to result from the fact that I’m not talking about the pseudo-causal structure of the modeling units comprising the simulation, but rather the causal structure of the underlying physical basis of the computer running the simulation.
Anyway, I hope this helps.