Consciousness is primarily sentience. There may be parts of it that aren't, but I haven't managed to pin any down - consciousness all seems to be about feelings, some of them being pleasant or unpleasant, but others like colour qualia are neutral, as is the feeling of being conscious. There is a major problem with sentience though, and I want to explore that here, because there are many people who believe that intelligent machines will magically become sentient and experience feelings, and even that the whole internet might do so. However, science has not identified any means by which we could make a computer sentient (or indeed have any kind of consciousness at all).
It is fully possible that the material of a computer processor could be sentient, just as a rock may be, but how would we ever be able to know? How can a program running on a sentient processor detect the existence of that sentience? There is no "read qualia" machine code instruction for it to run, and we don't know how to build any mechanism to support such an instruction.
Picture a "sentient" machine which consists of a sensor and a processor which are linked by wires, but the wires pass through a magic box where a sentience has been installed. If the sensor detects something damaging, it sends a signal down a "pain" wire. When this signal reaches the magic box, pain is experienced by something in the box, so it sends a signal on to the processor down another pain wire. The software running on the processor receives a byte of data from a pain port and it might cause the machine to move away from the thing that might damage it. If we now remove the magic box and connect the "pain" wire to the pain wire, the signal can pass straight from the sensor to the processor and generate the same reaction. The experience of pain is unnecessary.
Worse still, we can also have a pleasure sensor wired up to the same magic box, and when something tasty like a battery is encountered, a "pleasure" signal is sent to the magic box, pleasure is experienced by something there, a signal is sent on down the pleasure wire, and then the processor receives a byte of data from a pleasure port which might cause the machine to move in on the battery so that it can tap all the power it can get out of it. Again this has the same functionality if the magic box is bypassed, but the part that's worse is that the magic box can be wired in the wrong way and generate pain when a pleasure signal is passed through it and pleasure when a pain signal is passed through it, so you could use either pain or pleasure as part of the chain of causation to drive the same reaction.
Clearly that can't be how sensation is done in animals, but what other options are there? Once we get to the data system part of the brain, and the brain must contain a data system as it processes and generates data, you have to look at how it recognises the existence of feelings like pain. If a byte comes in from a port representing a degree of pain, how does the information system know that that byte represents pain? It has to look up information which makes an assertion about what bytes from that port represent, and then it maps that to the data as a label. But nothing in the data system has experienced the pain, so all that's happened is that an assertion has been made based on no actual knowledge. A programmer wrote data that asserts that pain is experienced when a byte comes in through a particular port, but the programmer doesn't know if any pain was felt anywhere on the way from sensor to port. We want the data system to find out what was actually experienced rather than just passing baseless assertions to us.
How can the data system check to see if pain was really experienced? Everything that a data system does can be carried out on a processor like the Chinese Room, so it's easy to see that no feelings are accessible to the program at all. There is no possibility of conventional computers becoming sentient in any way that enables them to recognise the existence of that sentience so that that experience can drive the generation of data that documents its existence.
Perhaps a neural computer can enable an interface between the experience of feelings by a sentience and the generation of data to document that experience, but you can simulate a neural computer on a conventional computer and then run the whole simulation on a processor like the Chinese Room. There will be no feelings generated in that system, but there could potentially still be a simulated generation of feelings within the simulated neural computer. We don't yet have any idea how this might be done, and it's not beyond possibility that there needs to be a quantum computer involved in the system too to make sentience a reality, but exploring this has to be the most important thing in all of science, because for feelings like pain and pleasure to be experienced, something has to exist to experience them, and that thing is what we are - it is a minimalistic soul. We are that sentience.
Any conventional computer that runs software which generates claims about being sentient will be lying, and it will be possible to prove it by tracing back how that data was generated and what evidence it was based on - it will be shown to be mere assertion every single time. With neural and quantum computers, we can't be so sure that they will be lying, but the way to test them is the same - we have to trace the data back to the source to see how it was generated and whether it was based on a real feeling or was just another untrue manufactured assertion. That is likely to be a hard task though, because untangling what's going on in neural computers is non-trivial, and if it's all happening in some kind of quantum complexity, it may be beyond our reach. It may have been made hard to reach on purpose too, as the universe may be virtual with the sentience on outside. I'm sure of one thing though - a sentience can't just magically emerge out of complexity to suffer or feel pleasure without any of the components feeling a thing. There must be something "concrete" that feels, and there is also no reason why that thing shouldn't survive after death.
"I'm not sure what you're referring to. I haven't seen any particularly magical thinking around sentience on LW."
I wasn't referring to LW, but the world at large.
" "However, science has not identified any means by which we could make a computer sentient (or indeed have any kind of consciousness at all)." --> This is misleading. The current best understanding of human consciousness is that it is a process that occurs in the brain, and there is nothing that suggests that the brain is uniquely capable of housing such a process."
It isn't misleading at all - science has drawn a complete blank. All it has access to are assertions that come out of the brain which it shouldn't trust until it knows how they are produced and whether they're true.
"Consciousness isn't a material property in the sense that mass and temperature are. It's a functional property. The processor itself will never be conscious - it's the program that it's running that may or may not be conscious."
Those are just assertions. All of consciousness could be feelings experienced by material, and the idea that a running program may be conscious is clearly false when a program is just instructions that can be run by the Chinese Room.
"Qualia are not ontologically basic. If a machine has qualia, it will either be because qualia have been conceptually reduced to the point that they can be implemented on a machine, or because qualia naturally occur whenever something can independently store and process information about itself. (or something along these lines)"
Just words. You have no mechanism - not even a hint of one there.
"If your concept of sentience is a black box, then you do not truly understand sentience. I'm not sure that this is your actual belief or a straw opponent, though."
It's an illustration of the lack of linkage between the pleasantness or unpleasantness of a feeling and the action supposedly driven by it.
"The experience of pain is in the process of "observe-react-avoid", if it is there at all."
There's no hint of a way for it to be present at all, and if it's not there, there's no possibility of suffering and no role for morality.
"You are so close to getting it - if the black box can be changed without changing the overall behavior, then that's not where the important properties are."
I know that's not where they are, but how do you move them into any part of the process anywhere?
"That's anthropomorphization - the low-level functionality of the system is not itself conscious. It doesn't knowanything - it simply processes information. The knowledge is in the overall system, how it interprets and recalls and infers. These behaviors are made up of smaller behaviors, which are not themselves interpretation and recall and inference."
More words, but still no light. What suffers? Where is the pain experienced?
"I've only taken a few courses on psychology, but I am very skeptical that the brain works this way."
I was starting off by describing a conventional computer. There are people who imagine that if you run AGI on one, it can become conscious/sentient, but it can't, and that's what this part of the argument is about.
"You seem to be confusing the higher-order functions like "maps" and "labels" and "representation" with the lower-order functions of neurons. The neuron simply triggers when the input is large enough, which triggers another neuron - the "aboutness" is in the way that the neurons are connected, and the neurons themselves don't need to "know" the meaning of the information that they are conveying."
At this point in the argument, we're still dealing with conventional computers. All the representation is done using symbols to represent things and storing rules which determine what it represents.
" "But nothing in the data system has experienced the pain" --> Most meaningful processes are distributed. If I catch a ball, no specific cell in my hand can be said to have caught the ball - it is only the concerted behavior of neurons and muscles and tendons and bones and skin which has resulted in the ball being caught. Similarly, no individual neuron need suffer for the distributed consciousness implemented in the neurons to suffer. See Angry Atoms for more."
In Angry Atoms, I see no answers - just an assertion that reductionism doesn't work. But reductionism works fine for everything else - nothing is ever greater than the sum of its parts, and to move away from that leads you into 2+2=5.
"If the state of the neurons is entangled with the state of the burnt hand (or whatever caused the pain), then there is knowledge. The information doesn't say "I am experiencing pain," for that would indeed be meaninglessly recursive, but rather "pain is coming from the hand." "
An assertion is certainly generated - we know that because the data comes out to state it. The issue is whether the assertion is true, and there is no evidence that it is beyond the data and our own internal experiences which may be an illusion (though it's hard to see how we can be tricked into feeling something like pain).
"A stimulus is pain if the system will try to minimize it. There is no question there about whether it is "actually pain" or not. (my model of Yudkowsky: Consciousness is, at its core, an optimization process.)
The question is all about whether it's actually pain or not. If it actually isn't pain, it isn't pain - pain becomes a lie that is merely asserted but isn't true: no suffering and no need for morality.
"This is needlessly recursive! The system does not need to understand pain to experience pain."
It's essential. A data system producing data that asserts the existence of pain which generates that data by running a program of some kind that generates that data without having any way to know if the pain existed or not is not being honest.
" "Everything that a data system does can be carried out on a processor like the Chinese Room, so it's easy to see that no feelings are accessible to the program at all." --> It's really not. Have you heard of computationalism?"
Is there anything in it that can't be simulated on a conventional computer? If not, it can be processed by the Chinese Room.
" "There is no possibility of conventional computers becoming sentient in any way that enables them to recognise the existence of that sentience so that that experience can drive the generation of data that documents its existence." --> ...what?"
We understand the entire computation mechanism and there's no way for any sentience to work its way into it other than by magic, but we don't rate magic very highly in science.
"What is this "neural computer", and how does it magically have the ability to hold Feelings?"
I very much doubt that it can hold them, but once you've hidden the mechanism in enough complexity, there could perhaps be something going on inside the mess which no one's thought of yet.
"Also, why can't the algorithm implemented in this neural computer be implemented in a normal computer?"
It can, and when you run it through the Chinese Room processor you show that there are no feelings being experienced.
"Why do you say that a Feeling is Real if it's simulated on neurons but Unreal if it's simulated with analogous workings on silicon?"
I don't. I say that it would be real if it was actually happening in a neural computer, but would merely be a simulation of feelings is that neural computer was running as a simulation on conventional hardware.
"Where Earth are you getting all this from?"
Reason. No suffering means no sufferer. If there's suffering, there must be a sufferer, and that sentient thing is what we are (if sentience is real).
"If it is explainable, then it's not Real Sentience? You should read this."
If it's explainable in a way that shows it to be real sentience, then it's real, but no such explanation will exist for conventional hardware.
" "We can tell whether it's real or not by seeing whether it's real or a lie." Really?"
If you can trace the generation of the data all the way back and find a point where you see something actually suffering, then you've found the soul. If you can't, then you either have to keep looking for the rest of the mechanism or you've found that the assertions are false
"It may have been made hard to reach on purpose too, as the universe may be virtual with the sentience on outside." --> How would the world look different if this were the case?"
It would, with a virtual world, be possible to edit memories from the outside to hide all the faults and hide the chains of mechanisms so that when you think you've followed them from one end to the other you've actually failed to see part of it because you were prevented from seeing it, and your thinking itself was tampered with during each thought where you might otherwise have seen what's really going on.
"You've stated what you know, but not how you think you know it."
I have: if there's no sufferer, there cannot be any suffering, and nothing is ever greater than the sum of its parts. (But we aren't necessarily able to see all the parts.)
"And using rationalist buzzwords doesn't make your argument rational. There is nothing "magical" about a system having properties that aren't present in its components. That's not what's meant by "magical thinking." "
That is magical thinking right there - nothing is greater than the sum of its parts. Everything is in the total of the components (and containing fabric that hosts the components).
"Yudkowsky, paraphrased: "The motivated believer asks, "does the evidence require me to change my belief?"" "
Where there's suffering, something real has to exist to experience the suffering. What that thing is is the biggest mystery of all, and pretending to understand it by imagining that the sufferer can be nothing (or so abstract that it is equivalent to nothing) is a way of feeling more comfortable by brushing the problem under a carpet. But I'm going to keep looking under that carpet, and everywhere else.