If I give you a DVD with 4 GB of raw binary data on it, is it information or not? To you, it’s not, because you don’t know how to interpret it. To me, it is because I know what it is.

You know what it is, and I for sure don’t say that if something doesn’t have meaning to me, it doesn’t have meaning at all. What I’m saying is that for something to be information it needs to have meaning. Consider this… what if you give me a brand new external memory – EM1, where the bits are not initialized to some value, but they have random values. Is there information on it or not? Say that you give me another external memory EM2 on which you wrote some information (that is, to you this information mean something). We would agree that EM2 contains information. But what if EM1 by pure chance happen to be in same state like EM2? If we agree that EM1 doesn’t contain information, but EM2 does, it has to be something about the wider context, that makes the state of EM2 information, and not the state of EM1.

So, I’m not saying that something has meaning for me to have information, but it has to have meaning in general. The same state of few bits of memory can be used to mean all different kinds of things, it could be ASCII, it could be UTF-8, it could be binary representation of a number, and so on… The state on it’s own as a sign, doesn’t determine what is meant by the sign.

Now, you say that this information which is in the lookup tables doesn’t mean something to me, but that it means something to the “consciousness represented by that information”. But that seems as a problem, no? It can’t be that information only means something to the consciousness, when the existence of that consciousness is dependent on the meaning of the information. So, we need the meaning of the information to be related to something else.

That’s why I mentioned the causal/historical element. Maybe we can say that information has meaning because of where it was recorded, like the information in EM2 has meaning because of where, how and why it was recorded.

Though, to me this kind of sounds weird too – that the replay system consciousness or not will depend on how it is created.

As for the mind/body issue, we really know that if we do something to the brain it affects also the consciousness, but we don’t know what is about the brain that maybe causes or is correlated to the consciousness. So, I’m just saying that we don’t know if it is the fact that it is neural network that has something to do with consciousness, maybe other systems which are not neural networks can be conscious, maybe it is specific chemicals, some specific physical processes, maybe something else, etc…

Again, I think you need to look at it from the viewpoint that YOU are the one being simulated. What could the people running the simulation do that would cause your consciousness to disappear?

It has to mean something, but it doesn’t have to mean anything to YOU. It only has to mean something to the consciousness being represented by the information.

If I give you a DVD with 4 GB of raw binary data on it, is it information or not? To you, it’s not, because you don’t know how to interpret it. To me, it is because I know what it is.

If I’m the only one who knows what it is, and I die, is it still information? Now no one can interpret it! But it is still information. It’s just not ACCESSABLE information.

So I think you need to look at the question from the viewpoint of someone being simulated, NOT from the viewpoint of someone RUNNING the simulation.

> I want to point that the lookup table is some
> physical system and it is in some physical state.

Okay, so we start with a big set of numbers that represent the brain’s state at a given moment (state A). We need to do a bunch of calculations to transform this set of numbers into a NEW set of numbers that represent the brain’s state at the NEXT given moment (state B).

But your record/replay example shows that we can skip doing the actual calculations and use precomputed values…up to and including the point where we just take state B and say, here’s the output of the calcutions that we did on state A.

You start with the idea that we could just replay the output from 1 neuron and do the rest of the calculations. And then say, let’s do replays for 10 neurons. 10000 neurons. Up to ALL of the neurons.

When we do replay for ALL the neurons, we’re basically just jumping directly to state B from state A by doing one single lookup. “Given input state A, output state B”. And by moving step by step up to this (1 neuron, 10 neurans, 10000 neurons, etc), nowhere do we see where consciousness would not be produced.

> or maybe it’s causal history. Would you agree with this?

So even in the “full replay” mode, there is still a causal link between state A and state B…the lookup. But this lookup is so computationally simple, and so disimilar from the original neural calculations, that I’m inclined to say that it has NO involvement in the production of consciousness. The lookup only has meaning to you, the observer, not to the consciousness being produced by “full replay” mode.

The presence and concentration of various chemicals would be incorporated into the brain’s “state” at a given moment. So I don’t see this as a problem.

I think it’s very close to a settled question. Changes to the physical structure of the brain affect conscious experience in very repeatable and predictible ways. The changes can be via damage to the brain, the changes can be via use of drugs, and the results are pretty unambiguous.

There may be some unexpected twist yet to be discovered, but the idea that the material brain’s state is directly related to and responsible for conscious experience has to be BY FAR the best explanation for the evidence currently available.

What I’m saying is that the information has to mean something in order to be information. Take for example the saved outputs of the neurons. They will be represented by some state of affairs in some system, maybe by bunch of switches of some kind. But, surely the state of affairs by itself isn’t information about something, or by some specific something. Take one switch for example, and say it is turned on. But it can be used to represent an infinity of things. Or take bunch of switches, and their state, same with those. They might represent something, or really they might not represent anything at all. We might be at some switch-garbage, where people dispose of their switches, not caring about their state.

So, when you talk about the information in the lookup table, I want to point that the lookup table is some physical system and it is in some physical state. But if we take it in isolation, I don’t see any reason to treat it as information in first place. Why would we treat it as an information about consciousness, and not information e.g. that there is a lion in the context of communication where people agree to represent that there is a lion with that specific state of affairs?

So, I think if we want to talk about the information, we probably need to get to wider context… to relate that state of the system (which we call lookup-table) with its function, or maybe it’s causal history. Would you agree with this?

On the issue if neural networks are sufficient to generate consciousness, I’m not sure that we know that as we don’t know what in fact correlates with the consciousness, and WHY it does. Maybe it depends on the specific chemical make-up of the neurons for example, and so on.

So I think you’re looking at the “simulated consciousness” from the outside, and saying “this information has to mean something to me for it to be real”.

But to the consciousness that’s being simulated, it doesn’t matter whether you can interpret it or not, right?

If certain patterns are represented by the data, then a consciousness will emerge.

Now, Chalmers, in the paper I referenced, says that data about mental states isn’t enough. He says that causal relationships (as implemented by computations) between “brain states” are also important to generate consciousness. He says this to avoid the “dust theory” problem (http://interweave-consulting.blogspot.com/2007/08/dust-theory-for-beginners.html).

BUT, I think that your record/replay example goes a long way towards saying that causal relationships are NOT important, because the neural computations aren’t done, yet consciousness STILL should be generated (especially for the cases where only a small subset of neurons are in replay mode).

Now, I suppose that you could say that there is still some computation being done in the form of doing the lookups, and that this would be sufficient to preserve the causal realtionship topology that Chalmers talks about. But lookups are a pretty slim reed, calculation wise, and I think some variations on the replay idea could whittle it down even further.

ALSO:

> Yes, I would say that if we allow that there is a consciousness

If neural networks are sufficient to generate consciousness, then I think we have to allow it, don’t we?

And I think that all of the available evidence points to the idea that neural networks ARE sufficient.

Yes, I would say that if we allow that there is a consciousness, even when we have simple lookups, it would seem that we have Platonic realism about information, and its relation to consciousness.
I don’t know how to think of this though, in relation to the notion of information we usually have. That is, usually when we talk about information, we are talking about information about something, that is, we are talking about signals traveling through communication channels, where they can take one of possible states, and where each of those states has some predetermined meaning. For example, if we have symbols 1 or 0, one can use 1 to transfer information e.g. that the light is on, and 0 to transfer the information that the light is off.

But the ones and the zeros taken by themselves are not enough to speak about information. That is, only if they mean something we can talk about information. So, back to the look-ups, if we want to give some platonic existence to information, what kind of information would be this. Maybe you are saying that we should take it as an information about what kind of neural patterns there were in the brain?

That is an interesting concept, but I’m having troubles forming some reasonable idea in my mind in relation to it.

So the information is contained in the discrete states of the CSA (combinatorial state automata). Chalmers says that computation provides the “causal connections” between these discrete states.

However in the replay argument you present, these computations/calculations are removed…replaced by lookups into precomputed results. And looking at your example, it would seem that consciousness would still be the result, certainly if you only replaced one neuron’s calculations with lookups, but I’d say even if you replaced nearly all (or even all) of the neural calculations with the simple lookups.

So, calculation doesn’t seem to be necessary to producing consciousness.

But, the precomputed results DO contain the information for the discrete states. Basically you’re just indexing into this information when you do lookups.

So it seems to me that consciousness is in the information, not in the calculations/computations that originally generated the information.

Time, in my view, is an artifact of consciousness. If you are conscious, you have a perception of time passing and things changing. But time is generated by consciousness. Not the other way around.

I’d say what you are doing when you calculate the neural outputs, or do lookups to find the neural outputs for a single timeslice of a simulation, is you are bringing the consciousness being represented into your perceptual time frame…you are just synching up with it.

Obviously you don’t need an outside observer to make sense of your neural firing patterns, to find the information…you are emerge independently from the information represented by those patterns, independently of any outside observer. Any suitably set of patterns (spatially or temporally organized) will have a consciousness that emerges independently from the represented information.

I’m not sure how to understand the stance that the information is important.

Usually when we talk about information, it is information about something, that is we talk about information in the context of some communication, where different symbols carry information about something else.

So, when you say that the information is important, what kind of information are you pointing to?

The correct conclusion, in my opinion, is that computation/calculation is not important in generating consciousness. Only information is important.

So when you record the outcomes of the first run, you have all of the necessary information. This information contains the consciousness.

Subsequent runs where you do the replay just bring the consciousness into step with your perceptions, but to the consciousness itself the replay isn’t necessary.

Your “reductio ad absurdum” isn’t absurd at all, I think this example is evidence in favor of platonic realism or idealistic monism, or some such.

First two issues that I have with your solution of the problem:

You point to the idea that it is the spatiotemporal arrangement of the events within the brain which is responsible for the conscious thought. But, if I understand you right, it seems to me that this alone implies epiphenomenalism about consciousness. At least, if we don’t figure out some further metaphysical principle, which would make it necessary for the spatiotemporal arrangement to be related to consciousness, the presence or absence of it, seems doesn’t change anything to the actual functioning of the brain.

I also have problems with giving to the idea of simultaneity a big importance. That because I believe the time itself is merely abstraction from the changing things. But then, I buy special relativity, and you don’t seem to.

Having said that,I agree with you on the importance of the phenomena to which you point through phenomenological description (the examples of memorizing, of listening music, etc…), and that good theory of mind, should give account for this. Also, it seems to me that you don’t do the real time vs. phenomenological (experienced) time distinction, and there I agree also.