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aaronsw comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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I can't really speak for LW as a whole, but I'd guess that among the people here who don't believe¹ "qualia doesn't exist", 1 and 2 are fine, but we have issues with 3, as expanded below. Relatedly, there seems be some confusion between the "boring AI" proposition, that you can make computers do reasoning, and Searle's "strong AI" thing he's trying to refute, which says that AIs running on computers would have both consciousness and some magical "intentionality". "Strong AI" shouldn't actually concern us, except in talking about EMs or trying to make our FAI non-conscious.
Pretty much disagree.
Really disagree.
And this seems really unlikely.
¹ I qualify my statement like this because there is a long-standing confusion over the use of the word "qualia" as described in my parenthetical here.
Well, let's be clear: the argument I laid out is trying to refute the claim that "I can create a human-level consciousness with a Turing machine". It doesn't mean you couldn't create an AI using something other than a pure Turing machine and it doesn't mean Turing machines can't do other smart computations. But it does mean that uploading a brain into a Von Neumann machine isn't going to keep you alive.
So if you disagree that qualia is a basic fact of physics, what do you think it reduces to? Is there anything else that has a first-person ontology the way qualia does?
And if you think physics can tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain, what's the physical algorithm for looking at a series of physical particles and deciding whether it's executing a particular computation or not?
Something brains do, obviously. One way or another.
I should perhaps be asking what evidence Searle has for thinking he knows things like what qualia is, or what a computation is. My statements were both negative: it is not clear that qualia is a basic fact of physics; it is not obvious that you can't describe computation in physical terms. Searle just makes these assumptions.
If you must have an answer, how about this: a physical system P is a computation of a value V if adding as premises the initial and final states of P and a transition function describing the physics of P shortens a formal proof that V = whatever.
They're not assumptions, they're the answers to questions that have the highest probability going for them given the evidence.