shminux comments on [LINK] Scott Aaronson on Integrated Information Theory - Less Wrong
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Here is my summary of his post and some related thoughts.
Scott instrumentalizes Chalmers' vague Hard problem of consciousness:
into something concrete and measurable, which he dubs the Pretty-Hard Problem of Consciousness:
and shows that Tononi's IIT fails to solve the latter. He does it by constructing a counterexample which has arbitrarily high integrated information (more than a human brain) while doing nothing anyone would call conscious. He also notes that building a theory of consciousness around information integration is not a promising approach in general:
Scott is very good at instrumentalizing vague ideas (what lukeprog calls hacking away at the edges). He did the same for the notion of "free will" in his paper The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine. His previous blog entry was about "The NEW Ten Most Annoying Questions in Quantum Computing", which are some of the "edges" to hack at when thinking about the "deep" and "hard" problems of Quantum Computing. This approach has been very successful in the past:
after 8 years of work.
I hope that there are people at MIRI who are similarly good at instrumentalizing big ideas into interesting yet solvable questions.