This is just a distinction of the fineness of their awareness. Cats still do have a sense of time. “It’s afternoon. It’s evening. I’ve waited long enough by this mouse-hole, time for nap.” (Shouldn’t have baited his breath…) Just because it isn’t as finely detailed as ours doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
(That eagle over there can see things I can’t see, but that doesn’t make me blind.)
Whimper… I didn’t understand one single word of this.
Thank you very much for trying; I’m very, very sorry to have made you waste all that time. I simply am not educated in a way to comprehend this argument.
(I can do calculus in the complex field. I do have some education. But what you wrote… Well, “Whimper” is all I got.)
HMHW,
OK, as it says “relevant in practice, but not in theory”. I realize that ‘practice’ is a trivial hang up of engineers, and the consciousness under discussion deals with systems in practice not theory.
Crane
So, in the interest of science, I have conducted a series of tests. I have two subjects:
Cat - 15 year old short hair with loud opinions about everything.
Rock - Tool from archaeological site. It has intimate experience with humans.
I used 5 tests and graded each on a scale of 0 to 3.
Rock - a local Native American held the rock and told me it was an ancient tool and was very satisfied with it’s present state - score=1
Cat - “Meow” means ‘you better figure out what I want or I’ll escalate’.
“Brrraik” means if you don’t open the cat door things are going to get really loud around here - score=2
Rock - no response - score=0
Cat - no response - score=0
Rock - I checked it out with my oscilloscope and got no response - score=0
Cat - Report from animal lab says cats exhibit alpha waves - score=3
Rock - no response - score=0
Cat - Asleep on chair, I say “Diva”. She raises her head attentively - score=2
Rock - stays where put - score=0
Cat - At dusk goes outside to night blooming Datura plant and anticipates arrival of Sphinx Moth. Catches moth and carries it inside yowling triumphantly - score=3
So, the Cat gets a score of 10 to the rock’s 1.
The Cat is 67% conscious and the rock, given the benefit of supernatural assistance, is 7% conscious.
Crane
Trinopus,
Don’t feel bad. It’s just definition fondling. If you map the movements (states) of running pigs to those of birds then pigs can fly. This assumes you do not require implementation or practice.
Crane
Grin! At least this is a scientific approach!
I guess I would have felt better if the item in question weren’t so very inert. Rocks are just about the ne plus ultra of “Don’t do anything.”
For instance, if the argument had been that there is a possible game of chess that maps to a process of counting in binary from one to fifteen…well, yes, I can see that. A game of chess does things. There are processes involved.
But…a rock? Process? States? What states does a rock enter into? Someone turns it to face north, or upside down? It’s raining today, so the rock is wet? It just seems about as far from data processing as one can get.
Yeah - self actualization is a tough hurdle for rocks. It’s a pity.
I believe our discussion is centered on subjects that exhibit conscious properties without external mapping.
Crane
I believe you are correct, sir, but I’m not so sure it’s actually time that they are aware of. I really don’t know how animals regard concepts like past and future, but the truth is, even for we humans, there is no such thing as time. It’s something we created to quantify our universe and make it easier to plan work schedules, but the time is always Now. There is no other time that exists. It is an illusion.
Some time (as we define it) we are conscious of, and some we are not. Furthermore, the time we are conscious of seems to be inconsistent with actual time. Boring events seem to drag on forever, whole fun events seem to happen too quickly. Boredom, how we pass the time is a measure of how engaged we are with a given event. When a cat is crouched, ready to pounce, it seems to be aware of every microsecond that passes, let alone every second. But a cat does not think in terms of seconds or microseconds. It only knows that is so focussed on Now that nothing else matters or even exists.
Trinopus, all it is is mapping stuff.
You could pretty much map any set of numbers in the universe to any other set and create similar type arguments, in this case the rock and it’s states are an indirect pointer to the states in your brain.
The argument is that we can create some mapping from the rock’s states to our mental states, which means either the rock is conscious also (because via the mapping it just experienced the same state and therefore the same thing we do) or consciousness can not be described merely by this functional transition between states (the last part may be worded wrong but hopefully the general idea is accurate)
I guess it could be motion through space/time or the movement of atoms within it.
Well…I don’t want to get too philosophic here. We do know that there are regular rhythmic events – sunrises, the motion of pendulums, heartbeats, waves coming in to shore – and that these can be used to measure time…or something that works the way time works.
If it’s an illusion, it’s a compelling one, and one that allows us to cause events to be synchronized. Whether or not it is an illusion, my watch allows me to arrange to be at the restaurant at 6:30, and my date’s watch allows her to arrive fashionably late.
As others have been quoting in this thread, “If it’s an illusion, who is being fooled?” We’ve making very productive use of the illusion.
I thought I was “far out” in my acceptance of the “Chinese Room” as being “conscious.” But at least the Chinese Room is operating. It is a problem in mapping…but it is also a problem in processing.
There is an even more abstract AI notion, the AI “Book.” Just a great big (big!) book, with lots of blanks and “go to page xyz” instructions, and instructions like, “Write an ‘X’ in the next blank” and so on. The notion is that it fully mimics the functioning of consciousness. I would agree that it is conscious…but only if people are actually following the instructions. When the book is sitting idle on a shelf somewhere, its consciousness would be suspended.
That’s how I would take the consciousness of the stone: without actual operations, it isn’t conscious.
I’m sorry I couldn’t explain it better. But if you tell me where the argument looses you, then maybe I could try to make it more clear… But if you’re just hung up on, ‘but a rock just can’t be conscious’, then well, you’re exactly where the argument wants to get you—of course a rock can’t be conscious (at least not in the way we are)!
Regarding the lack of dynamics of the rock, well, as I said, if you look at it at a sufficiently fine-grained level, then there’s a lot going on—it looses some molecules, gains some, some atoms might undergo radioactive decay, all those sorts of things. It’s just not obvious on the macro-level, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
If it helps you, you could equally well imagine a tree in the wind, whose state is the configuration of its twigs and leaves—although keeping in mind that there’s no difference in quality, but merely in quantity.
Cute. Of course, it has nothing to do with the argument. First of all, none of your tests test for consciousness—a locked-in syndrome patient would fail them all (save the EEG one—but there is no EEG test for consciousness, and no reason to assume brain waves in the form we have them are either necessary or sufficient for consciousness), while being nevertheless fully conscious; likewise, a zombie-AI might pass them, without there being any attendant consciousness.
But even if they did test for consciousness, you’d miss the mark: the argument is not tht the rock shows all the behaviours of something conscious, but merely that it has the same experience, by virtue of performing the same computation. So say there is a program p that causes a machine to have just the experience you have at this very moment. Then, with just the same justification you have in saying ‘the machine implements p’, you can say that ‘the rock implements p’. This says nothing about either the machine’s, or the rock’s reaction to stimuli (or lack thereof). If computation is all there is to consciousness, something can sit there being perfectly inert, while nevertheless having the full spectrum of conscious experience you do. If you like, you can compare it to a dream: you have a subjective experience of walking around doing things, while you actually aren’t. It would be the same for the rock.
Sorry, but all I have is a naïve intuitive sense that it’s wrong.
Let me try something regarding “mappings.”
I want to map “The Works of Shakespeare” to a number.
We know we can map the letters of the alphabet to numbers. A=1, B=2, etc.
We know we can improve on this by using something like Morse Code, where the letters that are more common are indicated by short sequences, and the uncommon ones get the longer sequences. E and T, the most common letters, are “dot” and “dash.”
We can improve on this a little more by various compression techniques, such as are used in “Zip” files. The most obvious is “QU” which can almost entirely be replaced in English by “Q” – or by some non-alphabetical icon. “TH” can be replaced by an icon; etc.
But wait! I can do better! I can replace the entire works of Shakespeare with a five digit number: 14159. How?
This is the library card-catalog number of the bound and complete Shakespeare in my great-uncle’s library (he’s so organized, he even has a card catalog…)
And so, now, by this finagling, I have definitely shown that Shakespeare’s entire works are coded in the digits of pi!
But at that point, I’ve cheated. I’ve stopped using mappings and encodings, and gone to a physical pointer.
The jump from conscious entities to rocks seems to be the same kind of major jump in concept (in the opposite direction.) We aren’t talking about conscious minds any more, but some abstract description of them in some not-particularly representative language.
I completely believe that a conscious mind can be made up out of transistors…or even little paddle-switches…but that the mind has to “operate” (or be operated externally) and that there is nothing magical about neurons. But I can’t get over the hurdle of a mapping that isn’t usefully representational.
Otherwise… Jack Smith’s human mind can be shown to map onto the mind of the Empress Cleopatra (the VI) of Egypt, and so, in talking to him, you can talk to her, too.
It becomes Borges’ Library of Babel, where I think I’m reading Mark Twain, but the alien from a distant galaxy, reading the same book, understands it to be the training manual for his inflatable groin-piece.
Anything can be mapped to anything…but that doesn’t create information: it only makes information meaningless.
HMHW,
" something can sit there being perfectly inert, while nevertheless having the full spectrum of conscious experience you do." HMHW
If it is perfectly inert, it has no changing states, so even by your definition, it is not conscious.
Cuteness was Putnam carrying computational theory to the extreme of rocks.
A rock is not a computational system. Computational systems are organized for the purpose of computation, a rock is not.
The definition of computational systems is subject to debate. However, a broken computer is not a computational system. It cannot be mapped to a functional computer without changing it’s structure. In that case it is not a broken computer.
We can continue to include rocks in our tests for consciousness and see if they prevail.
Crane
Trinopus,
Well said!
Crane
Keep in mind the rock argument is not arguing that rocks are conscious, it’s just forcing us to try to better define consciousness due to the fact that an abstract functional/computational view of it falls into the rock trap.
One thing we do know is that form/structure matters. Although there could be many different types of brains with consciousness, we know that for our type of brain, changes to form/structure changes consciousness or eliminates it.
And, I think it’s safe to say that of all of the possible combinations/permutations of our brain components, only a small percentage would result in consciousness.
To me this points right back to function/computation.
Agreed, but somehow we accept the rock argument as a trap, or limitation. I don’t see it as such.
We are striving to understand the nature of consciousness. If others are championing consciousness in rocks, more power to them.
However, the rock arguments presented here are not valid. The starting point would be a definition of computational system.
Crane
Well, from the rest of your post, I think you do understand the argument correctly, you just don’t accept its conclusions, but nevertheless also don’t want to admit it as a reductio of the premise of computationalism; so, you try to find fault with its logic. That’s of course perfectly fine—it’s how I used to react to the argument, and along similar lines as you do (basically, what you propose is the germ of the complexity-response due to Aaronson I outlined earlier). But I no longer think that’s quite sufficient. I also don’t think this is a serious problem for rationalistic, or even naturalistic approach to consciousness: you’d have to argue first that naturalism implies computationalism, and I don’t think that’s true.
Not really. What you propse is still a perfectly fine code, and need not refer to any physical artifacts at all. Keep in mind that a code is (once again) just a mapping, i.e. a table taking code words to plaintext; if you receive a coded bit of text, you can just look it up in the table, and find the plaintext version.
So, if you receive the ciphertext ‘14159’, you just take your code book, and look up that number, and lo and behold, there it will list the complete works of Shakespeare. So the code is perfectly well decipherable without any reference to physical objects, and the like.
But I think what you want to do is something different. You want to point to the fact that, obviously, the string ‘14159’ does not contain the same information as all the works of Shakespeare—something must be added! You know, probably, that you can’t compress text arbitarily—there’s a lower bound, given by the Shannon entropy, such that if you compress beyond that, you can’t reliably extract the plaintext anymore—the code becomes ambiguous. So it seems that, in some sense, the string ‘14159’ must be a far too compressed cipher in order for the code to work.
But unfortunately, this doesn’t go through: the restriction to the Shannon entropy limit is only on average; that is, any unambiguous code must be such that on average, any message is at most compressed up to the Shannon limit. But this doesn’t mean that there can’t be messages that are compressed very highly—it merely means that there are some messages that will have a longer ciphered version, in order to even things out. So your code can be perfectly well extended to one in which arbitrary messages can be sent, however, some of them will yield quite longe ciphertexts.
Of course, in practice, most codes are chosen such that roughly all messages are coded uniformly; but this is only a requirement of expediency, not one of principle. In fact, it’s something that fails to be the case for most possible codes.
I tried to sharpen this argument using the notion of algorithmic information, which, in a nutshell, considers the information content of a given message to be the shortest program on some universal machine (satisfying certain conditions) that produces the message as output. Intuitively, this should allow it to go through: unlike Shannon entropy, the algorithmic information is defined for individual messages, and so, one might argue that since ‘14159’ and Shakespeare’s complete works have vastly different algorithmic information content, they can’t be said in any real sense to be ‘the same message’. But this also doesn’t quite work: algorithmic information content is only defined up to an arbitrarily large additive constant, which induces basically the same leeway into the definition of ‘information content of a string’.
That’s not actually a property of the mind, but merely one of language: there is a table mapping Jack’s responses to Cleopatra’s, such that if you were in possession of that table, you would know, translating Jack’s replies, how Cleopatra would have answered. This is, in principle, not different from translating a book into a different language.
Well, the quintessential property of information is that it is meaningless: a bit of information is just a difference (between two things, between two states of the same thing, etc.). There is no meaning attached to a bit; that meaning comes only in the interpretation (by, say, a human mind). Only if you are in possession of the correct map, the correct translation, you will know that one lamp means ‘by land’, and two mean ‘by sea’. Without this context, the message is meaningless; but computation by itself is without such a context. This is what’s meant by ‘you can’t get semantics (meaning) from syntax (structure)’. But what’s in our head evidently has semantics, it has meaning, it has a context; that’s why it’s so difficult to reduce it to computation, to pure syntax.
Nobody’s doing so, however.
I tend to use the definition ‘any system that performs a computation’.
But it is an interesting argument that forces us to dig deeper. Whatever is going on inside our brain to create consciousness should be describable with math if we assume it is just computation. But those relations and transformations can be accomplished in many ways such that our intuition says it’s not conscious.
Which forces us to look at the computations in our brain and try to figure out what makes them special.
Well, it seems to me that the issue with the rock is that we just transferred the consciousness calcs to a different place (the mappings we envision in our heads or write down on paper). The rock itself isn’t performing those calcs, it’s just acting as the flux to trigger an indirect computation.
HMHW,
No, you don’t get to use a word to define itself.
System - a group of interconnected parts
Computation - to determine by calculation
A minimum computing physical system consists of:
Two inputs
A device that transforms the information by calculation
One output
Since it is a system the inputs and output are connected to the transformative device in an orderly manner.
Since it is a physical system, it exists and is connected in an orderly manner.
The system may be as simple as an RF mixer-2 resistors and a non-linear element (diode)
Input A=f1, Input B=f2, Output=f1, f2, f1-f2, f1+f2
Your computational theory may break down when the system is a single diode, but perhaps not. In any case a rock does not have 2 inputs, a transformational device and an output connected in an orderly manner.
Crane