But the next-token aspect aside—if any Turing-machine-like system is accepted as conscious it leads down the path of panpsychism. Think of how many realizations of Turing-machines exist. If you accept one as conscious, you have to accept them all. Why? Because you can transform the initial conscious program to run on any Turing machine and given its input/output will be exactly the same in all situations including in discussions about consciousness then it stands to reason it will be conscious in all realizations: Anything else is the same as saying that discussions about consciousness are completely unrelated to actually experiencing consciousness, and in effect it is a coincidence that we walk about consciousness as if we are conscious, because they are not causally related.
If we accept that all realizations of the computation (including those on cog wheels, organ pipes, pen-and-paper calculations) then we have a situation like “OK, consciousness can run on a computer—but what is a computer?”. It is of course possible to argue that only very specific computational patterns generate consciousness, but is it really believable that this is what it takes, no matter how radically we transform the Turing-machine, and where it becomes really a matter of interpretation if there is a Turing machine at all.
Further, we would need to accept that all those radical transformations of the Turing machine doesn’t cause even the slightest change in experience of the subject (it can’t, because input/output is identical under all the transformation).
If one is not ready to accept that by reductio ad absurdum we need to reject Turing machines can be conscious in the first place.
Or we need to accept a panpsychist view—everything is in some sense conscious under some interpretation. W
But the next-token aspect aside—if any Turing-machine-like system is accepted as conscious it leads down the path of panpsychism. Think of how many realizations of Turing-machines exist. If you accept one as conscious, you have to accept them all. Why? Because you can transform the initial conscious program to run on any Turing machine and given its input/output will be exactly the same in all situations including in discussions about consciousness then it stands to reason it will be conscious in all realizations: Anything else is the same as saying that discussions about consciousness are completely unrelated to actually experiencing consciousness, and in effect it is a coincidence that we walk about consciousness as if we are conscious, because they are not causally related.
If we accept that all realizations of the computation (including those on cog wheels, organ pipes, pen-and-paper calculations) then we have a situation like “OK, consciousness can run on a computer—but what is a computer?”. It is of course possible to argue that only very specific computational patterns generate consciousness, but is it really believable that this is what it takes, no matter how radically we transform the Turing-machine, and where it becomes really a matter of interpretation if there is a Turing machine at all.
Further, we would need to accept that all those radical transformations of the Turing machine doesn’t cause even the slightest change in experience of the subject (it can’t, because input/output is identical under all the transformation).
If one is not ready to accept that by reductio ad absurdum we need to reject Turing machines can be conscious in the first place.
Or we need to accept a panpsychist view—everything is in some sense conscious under some interpretation. W