> If the brain is "a wet computer" (and if you have time I do challenge you to support this statement), why is it seemingly non deterministic? Or is it actually deterministic, and we just don't have the modelling technology to sufficiently grab all the variables?

I am slightly perplexed why anyone would make a big deal about apparent non-determinism.

Even if we assume there's no noise, the underlying physics is perfectly deterministic and we are in fact maxwell's demon. Then the brain is still a stateful, chaotic system. Being stateful and chaotic would mean you could never provide the same input twice and expect the same output because its previous state would also be its input. For any observer this would look quite non-deterministic unless you had a perfect model of ever bit of information in the brain. And currently nobody claims to have such a model.

And then let's add the noise, observer effect and quantum effects back in.

So really, it's not very surprising that the brain appears non-deterministic to any physically implementable observer.

But it is not particularly surprising. Not even good old silicon-based computers are fully deterministic. Apart from intentional noise inputs (hardware RNGs) they also experience things like cosmic rays flipping bits, electrons occasionally tunneling out from capacitors or flash storage when we don't want them to and so on. Simply overclock your computer and the rate of non-determinism will go up dramatically, but that does not mean it is zero at stock frequencies, just low enough to be usable.

I think consciousness is something of an accident, like so many things in the world. It seems to be useful, perhaps something like how it’s useful for a crow to be able to bend a metal wire, put it in the glass bottle and hook the food that the intelligence researchers cleverly placed inside the bottle. The world is shaped in such a way so as to reward such things and maybe conciouness is rewarding on a meta cognitive level, like solving certain problems become easier with a consciousness. It doesn’t seem independent of the world, but rather is, and we are, a reflection of the world’s sensory input. The world has hallucinated an image of itself.

When consciousness lights up during a lucid dream, the sensory perception is real enough so as to be confused for the real thing. Maybe the real thing is something of a dream. When Shakespeare wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of” in The Tempest, that seems to me to have been not far from the mark.

Here's a link to Blindsight, the Peter Watts novel mentioned in the post above. It can be read in browser or downloaded as a e-book. It is (IMO) well worth the read.

http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Jesus..I thought that title sounded familiar. I bought this book off Amazon for like $3 a few months back but couldn't get past the first few pages because the .mobi version is ridiculously horrible. Thanks for the link!

> Going with the principle of parsimony - consciousness is arguably inefficient.

Why is that? Very unobvious conclusion.

Peter Watts tells it better than me, but basically, looking at studies that show the human body reacts to, for example, a baseball flying at its face before the conscious parts of the brain even get a signal from the brain stem, one could argue that there's not really a point to the conscious brain at all.

This alongside the idea that bacteria or trees proliferate just fine without it, etc etc. This is the jist of my argument, if you want a way better analysis, please read peter watts, he is smarter than me and the work is already done.

For defending against flying baseball it may be true, but there is very little chance we could build society, economy, etc. where flying baseball exists without conscious parts of the brain.

I read Blindsight(3 times actually), and he described some end result there, skipping whole evolution process, in which that alien Intelligence (Rorschach) may or may not compete with conscious creatures.

Additionally the hypothesis that Rorschach doesn't have conscious or not managed or directed by creatures with conscious is just guess of that expedition, which doesn't really understand what Rorschach is.

From another hand, evolution on Earth demonstrates that conscious creatures (humans) completely outcompete all others.