From: hal@rain.org
Date: Sun Apr 04 1999 - 14:23:17 MDT
Eliezer has posed some fascinating puzzles, and I hope that people will
take the time to read them and try to give answers.
> Let's suppose that we record the tape, states, position, and actions
> of a conscious Turing machine, and play it back. Is the playback
> conscious? Probably not, because there's no causality, right? And if
> the playback was generated by quantum randomness, at some extreme level
> of improbability, then the conscious being "recorded" doesn't exist
> yet, right?
One aspect of most of these puzzles is that they focus on the issue
of playback. I've seen several other paradoxes which also are based on
this idea.
Are playbacks of conscious calculations themselves conscious?
My approach to this problem is to look at it from the point of view of
the (simulated?) consciousness itself. Suppose, right now, I am aware
that I am running in a computer of some sort, and that the computer's
state information will be recorded and then played back using the various
scenarios that Eliezer suggests.
To ask whether the playback is conscious is to ask, from my perspective,
might I be experiencing a playback right now? Is this "instance" of my
consciousness the result of a dynamic, causally-determined calculation,
or the result of a passive playback?
The problem is, I can't give a meaningful answer to the question.
Any answer I could give about what larger external environment I might
be a part of cannot be correct in most cases. Even if my consciousness
only exists during a causally based run of a computer, it could still be
run multiple times. Each time, I will behave in exactly the same way.
(I am assuming that there are not uncomputable elements necessary
for consciousness.) Each time, I will think exactly the same thing.
If I think to myself, "*this* instance of my consciousness is happening
on the third run of the experiment", I will think that every time.
It has to be wrong most of the time.
What, then, can I reasonably believe about the circumstances which
surround this instantiation of myself? As I see it, I can't conclude
anything specific about them. I might be run one time, I might be
run 1000 times, and it will feel exactly the same. My "inner" time and
sense of conciousness has no relation whatsoever to outer time and place.
I might be run one million times slower than real time, or one million
times faster. My brain could be simulated by a galaxy-wide computer with
one processing element per star system, with each thought taking eons.
None of this will be perceptible to me.
>From my own perceptions and senses, I can't conclude anything about the
external world. I can't tell how many times I am instantiated; I can't
tell which particular systems instantiate me.
In particular, I can't tell whether a replay is conscious. It might be,
or it might not be. It would make no perceptible difference to me.
If even I, the inner conscious entity, can't tell whether a replay is
conscious, is it really a meaningful question?
Throughout the philosophy of consciousness, we continually face a
dichotomy between the objective and the subjective. We try to link
them; computationalism and, more generlly, materialism, try to say
that there are objective facts corresponding to the subjective facts
of consciousness.
But in this case, there is no subjective fact to begin with. There is
no subjective meaning to the question of whether a replay is conscious.
Therefore, I'd suggest, we can say that there is no objective meaning
to the matter, either.
Simply put, it is meaningless to ask whether a replay is conscious; it
is meaningless even to ask whether a second run of a conscious program
further instantiates the consciousness. There is no subjective fact of
the matter to resolve, and so there is no objective problem which can
be solved, either.
Hal
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