Well it probably is computing insofar it’s the wind bringing in actual bits of information, not you while searching for a specific pattern instantiation. The test: consider whether if original grains were moved around to form another prime number, would the wind still process them a similar way and yield correct answer?
This seems arbitrary to me. I’m bringing in bits of information on multiple layers when I write a computer program to calculate the thing and then read out the result from the screen
Consider, if the transistors on the computer chip were moved around, would it still process the data in the same way and wield the correct answer?
Yes under some interpretation, but no from my perspective, because the right answer is about the relationship between what I consider computation and how I interpret the results in getting
But the real question for me is—under a computational perspective of consciousness, are there features of this computation that actually correlate to strength of consciousness? Does any interpretation of computation get equal weight? We could nail down a precise definition of what we mean by consciousness that we agreed on that didn’t have the issues mentioned above, but who knows whether that would be the definition that actually maps to the territory of consciousness?
I recently came across unsupervised machine translation here. It’s not directly applicable, but it opens the possibility that, given enough information about “something”, you can pin down what it’s encoding in your own language.
So let’s say now that we have a computer that simulates a human brain in a manner that we understand. Perhaps there really could be a sense in which it simulates a human brain that is independent of our interpretation of it. I’m having some trouble formulating this precisely.
Right, and per the second part of my comment—insofar as consciousness is a real phenomenon, there’s an empirical question of if whatever frame invariant definition of computation you’re using is the correct one.
Well it probably is computing insofar it’s the wind bringing in actual bits of information, not you while searching for a specific pattern instantiation. The test: consider whether if original grains were moved around to form another prime number, would the wind still process them a similar way and yield correct answer?
This seems arbitrary to me. I’m bringing in bits of information on multiple layers when I write a computer program to calculate the thing and then read out the result from the screen
Consider, if the transistors on the computer chip were moved around, would it still process the data in the same way and wield the correct answer?
Yes under some interpretation, but no from my perspective, because the right answer is about the relationship between what I consider computation and how I interpret the results in getting
But the real question for me is—under a computational perspective of consciousness, are there features of this computation that actually correlate to strength of consciousness? Does any interpretation of computation get equal weight? We could nail down a precise definition of what we mean by consciousness that we agreed on that didn’t have the issues mentioned above, but who knows whether that would be the definition that actually maps to the territory of consciousness?
I recently came across unsupervised machine translation here. It’s not directly applicable, but it opens the possibility that, given enough information about “something”, you can pin down what it’s encoding in your own language.
So let’s say now that we have a computer that simulates a human brain in a manner that we understand. Perhaps there really could be a sense in which it simulates a human brain that is independent of our interpretation of it. I’m having some trouble formulating this precisely.
Right, and per the second part of my comment—insofar as consciousness is a real phenomenon, there’s an empirical question of if whatever frame invariant definition of computation you’re using is the correct one.