(I’m sorry if this comment is not accessible to many people. I also might have missed something in reading the paper, please do let me know if that’s the case!)
I do think many EAs who haven’t studied philosophy of mind probably (implicitly) believe functionalism a bit too credulously. It doesn’t matter very much right now, but maybe it will later.
But I’m not really convinced by this paper. I skimmed it and here are some initial thoughts:
A TV screen flickers between frames. If you watch an old or broken TV, you’ll notice this, but once the frame rate is high enough, you experience it continuously. Of course, it’s not actually continuous. A similar phenomenon occurs with pixels: they are discrete, but we experience them continuously.
You say that light is continuous, not discrete, but light (and every other elementary particle) behaves as discrete packets (photons) as well as waves. This makes me wonder if there is a real difference between analog and digital at extremely high levels of fidelity.
You give the example of mechanical watches, but I’m pretty sure the ones that seem continuous (i.e. have “sweeping hands” rather than ticking) are actually just higher frequency, and still move discretely rather than continuously. See here. Again, we experience them continously.
You mention hue, saturation, and brightness. We represent these in a computer just fine with only 24 (8 for each) bits most of the time, and we still get most of the same experiences. There are higher-fidelity color schemes but we barely notice this.
You argue in the paper that neurons are analog rather than digital. I agree that neurons are not simply on/off. But again, does this show anything about whether you can properly represent a neuron if you just allocate more than one bit to it? Something I find particularly problematic is that the evidence that neurons are analog presumably came from measuring action potentials and analyzing them. But aren’t the action potential measurements not represented digitally in a computer? How could that show evidence of analog behavior?
In the paper you have this caveat (and further explanation), which seems to dismantle many of my objections above:
On the Lewis-Maley view we adopt, to be analog does not require continuity, but only monotonic covariation in magnitude between the representation and what is represented. That increase or decrease can happen in steps, or it can happen smoothly (i.e., discretely or continuously). For example, consider the fuel gauges found in cars. Older cars often have a physical dial that more-or-less continuously moves from ‘F’ to ‘E’ as fuel is consumed; this dial is an analog representation of the amount of fuel in the car, because as fuel decreases, so does the literal angle of the dial. Newer cars often have a different way of displaying fuel. Instead of a physical dial, fuel is displayed as a bar graph on an LED or LCD display. Importantly, that bar graph is composed of discrete segments. Nevertheless, this is still an analog representation of the amount of fuel: as fuel decreases, the number of segments decreases. In contrast, we can imagine a fuel gauge that simply displays the number of gallons (or liters) of fuel in the tank (e.g., ‘6.5’ for six and a half gallons). Here, as fuel decreases, the digits displayed do not increase or decrease (the way they would if we changed the font in a paper): they simply change.
The suggestion here is that if we encode something in unary (number of on bits = magnitude) it is qualitatively different from being encoded in binary or decimal. This is not a straightforward claim. In your paper, it relies on panpsychism with microexperience: roughly speaking, the idea that consciousness arises from microconsciousness of fundamental particles. I think you’ve done a pretty decent job of arguing the conclusion given that premise, but I find the premise pretty unconvincing myself, and anyone else who does is similarly unlikely to be convinced by your argument.
TLDR: Yes, the magnitude of discrete representations of bits is completely contingent and arbitrary. But to say that two functionally identical organisms that are also isomorphic (usually more than we could ever ask for) are different in terms of the consciousness they produce seems to require some kind of microphenomenal laws. If you don’t believe in such laws, you shouldn’t believe this argument.
(I’m sorry if this comment is not accessible to many people. I also might have missed something in reading the paper, please do let me know if that’s the case!)
I do think many EAs who haven’t studied philosophy of mind probably (implicitly) believe functionalism a bit too credulously. It doesn’t matter very much right now, but maybe it will later.
But I’m not really convinced by this paper. I skimmed it and here are some initial thoughts:
A TV screen flickers between frames. If you watch an old or broken TV, you’ll notice this, but once the frame rate is high enough, you experience it continuously. Of course, it’s not actually continuous. A similar phenomenon occurs with pixels: they are discrete, but we experience them continuously.
You say that light is continuous, not discrete, but light (and every other elementary particle) behaves as discrete packets (photons) as well as waves. This makes me wonder if there is a real difference between analog and digital at extremely high levels of fidelity.
You give the example of mechanical watches, but I’m pretty sure the ones that seem continuous (i.e. have “sweeping hands” rather than ticking) are actually just higher frequency, and still move discretely rather than continuously. See here. Again, we experience them continously.
You mention hue, saturation, and brightness. We represent these in a computer just fine with only 24 (8 for each) bits most of the time, and we still get most of the same experiences. There are higher-fidelity color schemes but we barely notice this.
You argue in the paper that neurons are analog rather than digital. I agree that neurons are not simply on/off. But again, does this show anything about whether you can properly represent a neuron if you just allocate more than one bit to it? Something I find particularly problematic is that the evidence that neurons are analog presumably came from measuring action potentials and analyzing them. But aren’t the action potential measurements not represented digitally in a computer? How could that show evidence of analog behavior?
In the paper you have this caveat (and further explanation), which seems to dismantle many of my objections above:
The suggestion here is that if we encode something in unary (number of on bits = magnitude) it is qualitatively different from being encoded in binary or decimal. This is not a straightforward claim. In your paper, it relies on panpsychism with microexperience: roughly speaking, the idea that consciousness arises from microconsciousness of fundamental particles. I think you’ve done a pretty decent job of arguing the conclusion given that premise, but I find the premise pretty unconvincing myself, and anyone else who does is similarly unlikely to be convinced by your argument.
TLDR: Yes, the magnitude of discrete representations of bits is completely contingent and arbitrary. But to say that two functionally identical organisms that are also isomorphic (usually more than we could ever ask for) are different in terms of the consciousness they produce seems to require some kind of microphenomenal laws. If you don’t believe in such laws, you shouldn’t believe this argument.