The consciousness thing… I would be delighted if we could get a digital system to be conscious. Three reasons it’s probably impossible.
We would need to figure out how to collapse semantics into syntax, since digital systems are purely syntactic and consciousness deals with semantics.
The only examples of conscious systems we have are analog and heavily substrate-dependent — so, making neurons out of any artificial material breaks their functionality.
As Gödel said, “the mind is incapable of mechanizing all of its intuitions.” The first incompleteness theorem means that no computational procedure could exist to determine whether propositions are valid, provable, or even equivalent, and that no matter how you formulate the number-theoretic axioms, a human mathematician would always have insights (for instance, about whether a Diophantine equation has a solution) that are both clearly “true” and obviously unprovable.
It looks like digital systems are too constrained.
Add the Chinese room thought experiment into the mix and it really becomes impossible to see how a Turing machine (by itself, without analog components) could ever be conscious.
The consciousness thing… I would be delighted if we could get a digital system to be conscious. Three reasons it’s probably impossible.
It looks like digital systems are too constrained.
Add the Chinese room thought experiment into the mix and it really becomes impossible to see how a Turing machine (by itself, without analog components) could ever be conscious.