No digital consciousness

no botsI liked this account by Bobby Azarian of why digital computation can’t do consciousness. It has several virtues; it’s clear, identifies the right issues and is honest about what we don’t know (rather than passing off the author’s own speculations as the obvious truth or the emerging orthodoxy). Also, remarkably, I almost completely agree with it.

Azarian starts off well by suggesting that lack of intentionality is a key issue. Computers don’t have intentions and don’t deal in meanings, though some put up a good pretence in special conditions.  Azarian takes a Searlian line by relating the lack of intentionality to the maxim that you can’t get meaning-related semantics from mere rule-bound syntax. Shuffling digital data is all computers do, and that can never lead to semantics (or any other form of meaning or intentionality). He cites Searle’s celebrated Chinese Room argument (actually a thought experiment) in which a man given a set of rules that allow him to provide answers to questions in Chinese does not thereby come to understand Chinese. But, the argument goes, if the man, by following rules, cannot gain understanding, then a computer can’t either. Azarian mentions one of the objections Searle himself first named, the ‘systems response’: this says that the man doesn’t understand, but a system composed of him and his apparatus, does. Searle really only offered rhetoric against this objection, and in my view it is essentially correct. The answers the Chinese Room gives are not answers from the man, so why should his lack of understanding show anything?

Still, although I think the Chinese Room fails, I think the conclusion it was meant to establish – no semantics from syntax – turns out to be correct, so I’m still with Azarian. He moves on to make another  Searlian point; simulation is not duplication. Searle pointed out that nobody gets wet from digitally simulated rain, and hence simulating a brain on a computer should not be expected to produce consciousness. Azarian gives some good examples.

The underlying point here, I would say, is that a simulation always seeks to reproduce some properties of the thing simulated, and drops others which are not relevant for the purposes of the simulation. Simulations are selective and ontologically smaller than the thing simulated – which, by the way, is why Nick Bostrom’s idea of indefinitely nested world simulations doesn’t work. The same thing can however be simulated in different ways depending on what the simulation is for. If I get a computer to simulate me doing arithmetic by calculating, then I get the correct result. If it simulates me doing arithmetic by operating a humanoid writing random characters on a board with chalk, it doesn’t – although the latter kind of simulation might be best if I were putting on a play. It follows that Searle isn’t necessarily exactly right, even about the rain. If my rain simulation program turns on sprinklers at the right stage of a dramatic performance, then that kind of simulation will certainly make people wet.

Searle’s real point, of course, is really that the properties a computer has in itself, of running sets of rules, are not the relevant ones for consciousness, and Searle hypothesises that the required properties are biological ones we have yet to identify. This general view, endorsed by Azarian, is roughly correct, I think. But it’s still plausibly deniable. What kind of properties does a conscious mind need? Alright we don’t know, but might not information processing be relevant? It looks to a lot of people as if it might be, in which case that’s what we should need for consciousness in an effective brain simulator. And what properties does a digital computer, in itself have – the property of doing information processing? Booyah! So maybe we even need to look again at whether we can get semantics from syntax. Maybe in some sense semantic operations can underpin processes which transcend mere semantics?

Unless you accept Roger Penrose’s proof that human thinking is not algorithmic (it seems to have drifted off the radar in recent years) this means we’re still really left with a contest of intuitions, at least until we find out for sure what the magic missing ingredient for consciousness is. My intuitions are with Azarian, partly because the history of failure with strong AI looks to me very like a history of running up against the inadequacy of algorithms. But I reckon I can go further and say what the missing element is. The point is that consciousness is not computation, it’s recognition. Humans have taken recognition to a new level where we recognise not just items of food or danger, but general entities, concepts, processes, future contingencies, logical connections, and even philosophical ontologies. The process of moving from recognised entity to recognised entity by recognising the links between them is exactly the process of thought. But recognition, in us, does not work by comparing items with an existing list, as an algorithm might do; it works by throwing a mass of potential patterns at reality and seeing what sticks. Until something works, we can’t tell what are patterns at all; the locks create their own keys.

It follows that consciousness is not essentially computational (I still wonder whether computation might not subserve the process at some level). But now I’m doing what I praised Azarian for avoiding, and presenting my own speculations…