• magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
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    8 months ago

    Can a Turing Machine be conscious? I’m doubtful. I don’t believe there’s any set of instructions that are more conscious than others.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          “Which x86 instruction plays chess?”

          Nonsense question.

          Unless you believe in souls, the physical world follows rules, and those rules can be simulated. Why would a simulated brain behave any differently than a real one?

          • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
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            8 months ago

            I don’t think we can make definitive statements regarding the computability of the physical world when not everything of the physical world has been figured out yet.

            We know the X86 instructions of a chess engine. You can download it.

            We don’t know the X86 instructions of a human brain yet. We don’t know if such thing can exist.

            I don’t believe there’s some secret undiscovered Konami cheat code of X86 instructions that unlocks consciousness. There must be something more, unless we accept that all programs are conscious in one way or another.

            • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              The only way such a thing cannot exist is if you believe in magic.

              There must be something more, unless we accept that all programs are conscious in one way or another.

              No, that’s stupid. Unless you think all programs are chess engines in one way or another.

                • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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                  8 months ago

                  If you’re poised to cleverly bust out the halting problem - nature can’t solve the halting problem either. It’s not a riddle; it’s a contradiction.

                  Your brain is three pounds of wet meat powered by cornflakes. Unless you think it’s secretly a radio to heaven, it’s only biology, and the underlying physics of biology are rules we can emulate.

    • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Can a network of interlocked neurons following electrical and chemical laws be conscious? Also doubtful, but here we are.

      • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
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        8 months ago

        Turing machines are well defined mathematical models. Any Turing machine can be computed with just pen and paper. The result is indistinguishable from when a computer chip does it.

        Can the process of writing down computations on a paper posses consciousness?

        • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Yes, but what is consciousness. Why is replacing logic gates, or code with biological neurons actually different? Sure we know the exact details of how the computer runs software, but why does understanding it matter. If we lost the plans to a computer, or the source code to a program, would it make any difference? A brain is just a more complex biological computer, what makes it special?

          • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
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            8 months ago

            I’m doubtful that the physical world is Turing complete. I don’t see how any series of X86 instructions can produce any form consciousness. That is, unless we accept that the calculation of 1 + 1 = 2 may produce some consciousness. Is everything computable conscious, or is consciousness limited to some computations?

            • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              The physical world is not Turing complete for sure because of quantum mechanics. But I don’t see why quantum mechanics would lead to consciousness. The fact is that we can’t know what leads to consciousness as we can’t measure it in any meaningful way. You can only know that you are conscious. You cannot know if any other thing is conscious. There’s no where to draw the line. It’s hard to see an inanimate object could be conscious, or that a computer running a neural net could create consciousness, but maybe it’s just a matter of scale. And a non- linear scale. One needs a certain amount of complexity before consciousness is meaningful. Is a mouse conscious? An ant?