alt Hacker NewsOkay. I think at the core you're positing that consciousness does arise somehow from regular physical particles and the forces that attract and repel them, but that consciousness doesn't arise merely from some kind of computation or information processing.
I understand why computation doesn't intuitively seem the same as having a subjective conscious experience. But why is it any more intuitive that a bunch of protons, neutrons and electrons pushing and pulling on each other give rise to consciousness, but somehow do it by doing something other than computation?
It is because computation is an interpretation imposed on a physical system from the outside, but that is distinct from my experience of consciousness; your interpretation of my consciousness is irrelevant.
If I impose a computational interpretation onto inert material after the fact, did that material possess the consciousness? Suppose I overlay a projection of the calculation of an AGI onto a circuit board, is that projection equally conscious to if that circuit board did the computation in the usual way?
Said differently, suppose we take a large computer and simulate a sequence of random byte strings. At each tick we contrive a substring and form a new sequence out of these substrings such that the combined sequence of substrings simulates an AGI. Was consciousness present in the original sequence. Is it even necessary to do any computation at all to create the consciousness then since any intelligent sequence can be interpreted out of anything?
No, that is absurd. The reasonable view is that computation is irrelevant and what is relevant is some special physical process.