I think this idea is absurd. I do not think consciousness necessarily can only be produced by organic life, but I do think it has to emerge from physical structures. As of today we have no idea what properties such physical structures must have. It follows that computers are no more likely to become conscious than e.g. washing machines.
I don't think this is as absurd as it sounds. I think it was Dennett who said our intuition about consciousness is pretty sensitive to timing. The rock construction you describe would "think" a billion times slower than a human brain, and there is something unsettling or unintuitive about a consciousness that operates in slow motion. I would expect extremely fast-paced AI to think that the idea that human beings are conscious is similarly absurd.
Also, consciousness "feels" like it's ineffable, so it makes sense that we would have an inherent bias against understanding it as a process. There is something we see in our consciousness that we simply cannot wrap our minds around in any way (possibly because we're hallucinating it).
So yes, I would bite the bullet on this: consciousness could emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book. It would just be an excruciatingly "slow" consciousness.
If it's too slow to interact with the rest of the world in appropriate ways, it wouldn't be a consciousness at all.
Of course, part of the difficulty of imagining a conscious rockputer is that it's also pretty hard to imagine its inputs :)
This is trivially true as you state it; that's why I added the qualifier "in appropriate ways". Not all interactions will produce consciousness. One obvious difference between us and your hypothetical "rockputer" is that the "rockputer" can't change its behavior based on its inputs in a way that improves its chances of survival; rocks simply aren't built that way. Neither are star systems or galaxies. But we are.
Yes it can. Some natural events, for example a flood or an earthquake, can destroy parts of the rockputer. It is therefore important for it to store the various parts of itself strategically. It shouldn't put its vital parts near the coast, or a tsunami may kill it. It should store its own consciousness in a robust way, so that it can recover from an earthquake. It's probably too slow to actually see either of them coming, but it can certainly prepare itself.
Or imagine you build two rockputers, one with black stones, another with white stones, and you have rules to remove stones when both rockputers try to expand into the same territory, a bit like in the game of Go. Then one can kill the other.
Star systems interact with each other through gravity, so you could conceive of them as some kind of gargantuan atoms, capable of making complex structures, including conscious ones. Granted, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent of the other forces at that scale, so probably it wouldn't work, but you see what I mean.
The level of complexity of the "passive" components of the system (i.e. the rocks) is irrelevant to whether or not the system can effect conscious-seeming behaviour when acting dynamically. Analogously, the underlying components of people, i.e. atoms, are clearly quite dumb on their own. When those atoms are allowed to evolve collectively over time, according to dynamics dictated by basic physical laws, conscious-seeming behaviour magically appears.
You can't deny the possibility of a conscious rockputer just by considering properties of the rocks.
Yes, and in that case, all the actual computation is being done by the mechanism, not the rocks. As you say, the rocks are just "passive" components.
I agree that, in principle, such a system could compute; but it still has the problem of computing on a time scale that supports appropriate interactions with its environment. Moving rocks around in accordance with some set of computational rules based on inputs is very slow--quite possibly too slow to respond appropriately to inputs. For example, if incoming light rays are carrying information about a tidal wave that is about to swamp the rockputer and destroy its structure, could the rockputer compute an appropriate response (such as moving itself to higher ground) quickly enough to save itself?
The word "alone" here is not correct. Claiming that software on a computer can produce feelings is not the same as claiming that software on a computer can produce feeling without having to interact with anything else. The latter claim is obviously absurd; organic life forms like us don't produce feelings without interacting with anything else, so why should we expect software on a computer to do so? But ruling out the latter claim still leaves open the possibility that software on a computer could produce feelings if it were interacting with the rest of the world in appropriate ways.
> I do not think consciousness necessarily can only be produced by organic life, but I do think it has to emerge from physical structures.
Rocks in a certain pattern are physical structures. So this doesn't rule out rocks in a certain pattern producing feelings.
> As of today we have no idea what properties such physical structures must have.
I don't think we're that badly off. We expect embodied brains of sufficient size and complexity to produce feelings, but we don't expect three pounds of jello to produce feelings. So clearly we have some knowledge of the properties that physical structures must have to produce feelings. They must have some level of complexity and heterogeneity; they must be able to store information in some way that is recoverable (three pounds of jello can "store information" in some sense, but there's no way to recover it in any useful sense); and they must be interacting with the rest of the world in appropriate ways. There's no reason why we couldn't eventually build computers with these properties.
[Charlie Brown picks up a rock from the beach, and throws it into the water]
Linus: Nice going, Charlie Brown. It took that rock 4,000 years to get to shore, and now you've thrown it back.
Charlie Brown: Everything I do makes me feel guilty.
No. An argument that addition of integers is commutative will not contain such a qualifier. Nor will an argument that the laws of general relativity, say, correctly describe gravity in the regimes we have tested. If we had an argument of that sort--an argument based on deductive logic or detailed empirical knowledge of the problem domain--for a conscious computer being impossible, it would not need the qualifier either. But we don't.
That sounds a lot like the qualifier so far as we know in your own example. In fact, the only example you've given where it arguably doesn't apply is mathematics.
David Hume famously argued that causality is based on experience, and experience similarly based on the assumption that the future models the past, which in turn can only be based on experience – leading to circular logic. In conclusion, he asserted that causality is not based on actual reasoning: only correlation can actually be perceived.
No, because the claim that I made was limited in the same way as the qualifier: I didn't claim that GR was valid period, I only claimed it was valid in the regimes we have tested. But in those regimes, it is valid, period, or at least that was my claim--even though we haven't run all imaginable experiments in that regime.
The problem with the original claim I responded to is that it wasn't limited that way: the claim was made that something is impossible, period, but the supporting argument had the "so far as we know" qualifier in it. So the claim was going beyond the regime in which the supporting argument applied.