You shouldn’t because they are different intuitions. In fact I don’t know why you have the intuition that you can’t simulate complex processing with a Giant Look Up Table. All you have to do is record a series of inputs and outputs from a piece of software, and there is the database for your GLUT. Of course, that GLUT will only be convincing if it is asked the right questions. If any software is Gluttable up to a point, the Consciousness Programme is Gluttable UTAP. But we don’t have to believe a programme that is spitting out pre recorded digits of pi is calculating pi. We can keep that intuition.
In fact I don’t know why you have the intuition that you can’t simulate complex processing with a Giant Look Up Table. All you have to do is record a series of inputs and outputs from a piece of software, and there is the database for your GLUT.
That’s not a lookup table, that’s just a transcript. I only ever heard of one person believing a transcript is conscious. A lookup table gives the right answers for all possible inputs.
The reason we have the intuition that you can’t simulate complex processing with a lookup table is that it’s physically impossible—the size would be exponential in the amount of state, making it larger than the visible universe for anything nontrivial. But it is logically possible to have a lookup table for, say, a human mind for the duration of a human lifespan; and such a thing would, yes, contain consciousness.
Note that the piece of the original comment you don’t quote attempts to engage with this, by admitting that such a GLUT “will only be convincing if it is asked the right questions” and thus only simulates the original “up to a point.”
Which is trivially true with even a physically possible LUT. Heck, a one-line perl script that prints “Yes” every time it is given input simulates the behavior of any person you might care to name, as long as the questioner is sufficiently constrained.
Whether Peterdjones intends to generalize from that to a less trivial result, I don’t know.
If I say a GLUT can’t compute the output that is consciousness (suppose we have a consciousness detecting machine, the output will be whatever causes the needle on that machine to jump) without a model of a person equivalent to a person, you’ll probably say I’m begging the question. I can’t think of a way around that, but if you could refute that thought of mine, that would probably resolve a lot for me.
I agree that if the questioner is sufficiently constrained, then a GLUT (or even a Tiny Lookup Table) can simulate any process’s responses to that questioner, however complex or self-referential the process.
So, yes, any process—including conscious processes—can be simulated UTAP by a simple look-up table, in the same sense that living biological systems can be simulated by rocks UTAP.
If the intuition that look-up is not sufficient computation for consciousness is correct, then a flaw in the Turing Test is exposed. If a complex Computation Programme could pass
the TT, then a GLUT version must be able to as well.
The values of the GLUT have to be populated somehow, which means matching an instance of the associated computation against an identical stimulus by some means at some point in the past. Intuitively it seems likely that a GLUT is too simple to instantiate consciousness on its own, but it seems to be better viewed as one component of a larger system that must in practice include a conscious agent, albeit one temporally and spatially removed from the thought experiment’s present.
Isn’t this basically a restatement of the Chinese Room?
You shouldn’t because they are different intuitions. In fact I don’t know why you have the intuition that you can’t simulate complex processing with a Giant Look Up Table. All you have to do is record a series of inputs and outputs from a piece of software, and there is the database for your GLUT. Of course, that GLUT will only be convincing if it is asked the right questions. If any software is Gluttable up to a point, the Consciousness Programme is Gluttable UTAP. But we don’t have to believe a programme that is spitting out pre recorded digits of pi is calculating pi. We can keep that intuition.
That’s not a lookup table, that’s just a transcript. I only ever heard of one person believing a transcript is conscious. A lookup table gives the right answers for all possible inputs.
The reason we have the intuition that you can’t simulate complex processing with a lookup table is that it’s physically impossible—the size would be exponential in the amount of state, making it larger than the visible universe for anything nontrivial. But it is logically possible to have a lookup table for, say, a human mind for the duration of a human lifespan; and such a thing would, yes, contain consciousness.
Note that the piece of the original comment you don’t quote attempts to engage with this, by admitting that such a GLUT “will only be convincing if it is asked the right questions” and thus only simulates the original “up to a point.”
Which is trivially true with even a physically possible LUT. Heck, a one-line perl script that prints “Yes” every time it is given input simulates the behavior of any person you might care to name, as long as the questioner is sufficiently constrained.
Whether Peterdjones intends to generalize from that to a less trivial result, I don’t know.
If I say a GLUT can’t compute the output that is consciousness (suppose we have a consciousness detecting machine, the output will be whatever causes the needle on that machine to jump) without a model of a person equivalent to a person, you’ll probably say I’m begging the question. I can’t think of a way around that, but if you could refute that thought of mine, that would probably resolve a lot for me.
I agree that if the questioner is sufficiently constrained, then a GLUT (or even a Tiny Lookup Table) can simulate any process’s responses to that questioner, however complex or self-referential the process.
So, yes, any process—including conscious processes—can be simulated UTAP by a simple look-up table, in the same sense that living biological systems can be simulated by rocks UTAP.
I’ve lost track of why that is important.
If the intuition that look-up is not sufficient computation for consciousness is correct, then a flaw in the Turing Test is exposed. If a complex Computation Programme could pass the TT, then a GLUT version must be able to as well.
Sure, I agree that with a sufficiently constrained questioner, the Turing Test is pretty much useless.
The values of the GLUT have to be populated somehow, which means matching an instance of the associated computation against an identical stimulus by some means at some point in the past. Intuitively it seems likely that a GLUT is too simple to instantiate consciousness on its own, but it seems to be better viewed as one component of a larger system that must in practice include a conscious agent, albeit one temporally and spatially removed from the thought experiment’s present.
Isn’t this basically a restatement of the Chinese Room?