People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners

Re:People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners by s_weber on Friday February 17, 2023 @06:09AM (#34833281)

I think the absurdity might just stem from the different timescales involved when comparing human consciousness to the "paper consciousness". The differing timescales would make it difficult for us to communicate with or even comprehend such a "being".

But if we agree that consciousness is the product of a computation then the medium on which it is performed should not matter at all. And it should be equally absurd that our consciousness seems to arise from microscopic things conducting electrical and chemical signals. Which is probably a valid view point as well.

The thought experiment is a variation of the Chinese Room, by the way. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

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Re:People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners by n4r9 on Friday February 17, 2023 @09:42AM (#34835174)

I'd agree with all that. The idea of a "very slow consciousness" reminds me of Great-A'tuin in the Discworld novels, whose brain functions at a slow timescale. After centuries of study, telepaths were only able to glean that it is looking forward to something.

I think the absurdity also comes from the difficulty of directly measuring or evaluating the conscious process. You can ramp up the absurdity even more by fully encrypting the algorithm and destroying the encryption key. No other conscious being will ever be able to interact with that process's experience.

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