# Why Consciousness is not Computation **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 27, 2020, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-consciousness-is-not-computation/850402 "2020-03-27T06:13:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2020, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-consciousness-is-not-computation/850402/1 "2020-03-27T06:13:02Z")
The journal [_Minds and Machines_](https://www.springer.com/journal/11023) has been kind enough to let an article of mine slip through peer review: [The Abstraction/Representation Account of Computation and Subjective Experience](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-020-09522-x) (Full text accessible [here](https://rdcu.be/b3fVp). If you can’t access that page, a preprint version is also available at my [Academia.edu](https://www.academia.edu/42202763/The_Abstraction_Representation_Account_of_Computation_and_Subjective_Experience)-page.) I’m not going to try and give a detailed description of the arguments in the paper. Instead, I want to present a brief summary of its main claims; if there’s any interest in any of the points, we can then dive into those more deeply. So, here goes: The stuff of the world is physical stuff bearing relational structure. Structure here means essentially how things—elements of a mechanism, components, parts of an aggregate—relate to and interact with one another. Structure, at some level of granularity, is shared between an object and a model of that object—for example, the solar system and an orrery. Or more aptly, a map and the territory it represents. Computers are objects acting as models of the structure of abstract computations (as formalized, e. g., by Turing machines). A concrete computation—say, the function of adding two numbers—is instantiated by means of interpreting this structure. To be a model of something, a system needs to be interpreted—to be intelligible, every map needs a legend. This interpretation is furnished by means of the intrinsic properties of ‘physical stuff’ (the ‘structure-transcending’). Structure itself radically underdetermines its domain; hence, minds need a non-structural—and therefore, non-computational—element to perform interpretational acts. These structure-transcending mental properties are nothing but the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, which physics itself is silent on (the ‘inner un-get-atable nature’ of matter, in the words of Arthur Eddington). These can be brought to light by means of a certain self-referential process, paralleling von Neuman’s design for a self-reproducing automaton. Such a design is self-reading, and acquires a dependency on its intrinsic properties as a result. Due to its evolvability, it comes to resemble—to model—an organism’s environment. This is the origin of subjective experience: a structure impressed on the mind by the senses, capable of reading itself, and thus, leapfrogging structural underdetermination due to access to its own intrinsic properties (filling the ‘form’ of structure with the ‘content’ of its own intrinsic nature). It’s also the origin of the difficulty of explaining subjective experience (the ‘Hard Problem of consciousness’): the intrinsic can’t be derived from the structural, and hence, no models of it can exist. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-consciousness-is-not-computation/850402)._