anonymouszx
My whole argument was that I don't think one can describe the interactions of every atoms in the brain in a computable form. But actually, I would go further and say they likely can't even be described mathematically.
If this sounds crazy, consider that most mathematical objects are not describable (i.e. can't be singled out). For instance, most real numbers cannot even be imagined, and this stems from the fact that we can only describe things in a finite number of symbols, i.e. in bijection with the set of natural numbers, which is (infinitely) smaller than the set of real numbers.
>I don't understand this analogy.
This wasn't an analogy but an example to show the fundamental distinction between nonconcsious things, which can be dissected, described mathematically, and simulated (although it might be possible for something to be nonconscious and noncomputable at the same time, but we have no reason to believe that such things exist), and conscious things, which, at least in some very small part of them, cannot.
As for a rock being conscious or not, I choose to assume it's not for simplicity and because that seems sensible, but I'm not totally against panpsychism in principle.
I agree. I never said that ??? is "me" here.
To be honest, I've come to the daunting conclusion that the metaphysical self (as opposed to the psychological/physical self) is an illusion, resulting from our brains' memories. Consciousness wise, the me of tomorrow, or one hour from now, or one hour ago, etc., is just as distant from me now as you are from me now, or as a dinosaur millions of years ago is. And when you or anything else suffers greatly, this is just as much a concern as if I were to be told I will experience the same suffering in the future. Although my primate brain (thankfully) does not allow me to experience quite as much angst over others' suffering as my future self's.
As to how I come to this conclusion, just as most of us here would agree that we do not have eternal souls, since elements of our personality, memory, and so on, are by all indications stored inside our perishable brains, by the same line of reasoning, and applying Occams's Razor again, we should not have a separate "spirit" (even of the barest form) since our impression of our lives being individual and continuous is the result of the same brain structures. Shedding the idea of the "spirit" also has the nice benefit of solving the various paradoxes of Star Trek teleporters, atomic scale cloning of people, and so on.
There is also no reason to presume that our time exists at the level of consciousness, and the fact that general relativity precludes the existence of a canonical time ordering for the universe (Block Universe) also points me in that direction.
For instance, I can sensibly ask "what's it like to be a cat?". But "what's it like to be a rock?", or "to be a hot rock?", or "a cold rock?" doesn't make much sense since there's presumably nothing that it's like to be a rock regardless of its temperature.
???-to-brain: our brains keep records of conscious experiences and these records are why we're able to have such conversations as these
where ??? = Consciousness, the Universe, God, your spirit, your soul, or however you want to conceptualise it (I don't know or claim to know, although I would tend to argue that your spirit/soul isn't a thing (and neither mine of course), but that's another story)
You might naturally question how we could possibly store records of conscious experiences in our brains if these are indeed not things of the realm of computation. I think we can make an analogy with a camera here. A camera captures photons, but ultimately it does not store the photon but only some numbers (pixels, bits) which represent how to restore the original photons (although with a lot of loss). Now when these bits are fed into an appropriate device, e.g. a screen, some photons vaguely resembling the originals can be reproduced.
I see the brain as similar in that qualia cause excitation in our brain which are recorded in our memory and can be replayed in some dulled down form later, at least sometimes. But our brain doesn't store actual qualia but just records of them or perhaps just of having experienced them. If this were not the case, we would not be able to have this conversation.
To avoid further confusion, it might be worth pointing out that our brain might well store records of qualia and of physical/informational stimuli simultaneously, or sometimes perhaps just of one of these. So I'm not saying our brain reconstructs images from records of conscious experiences of those images for instance (but maybe, I don't know).
Now, one might propose that consciousness only arises when a computational process is physically run in certain ways but not others (this is what proponents of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) typically believe). Assuming this is the case, then implementing a potentially conscious process with biological neurons presents much higher moral hazard vs an implementation of the same process electronically, or safer still, on a Von Neumann machine.
I would go even further however, and propose that a conscious being (e.g. a being capable of generating the qualia of the color red for instance) cannot be simulated, i.e. conscious processes are generally noncomputable. Why? Well, consider what Chalmers calls the meta-problem of consciousness, which is to say the problem of why we perceive there to be a (hard) problem of consciousness in the first place (and why we are having this very conversation). A simulation of a conscious being would by definition present the same behaviours as that being (given the same stimulus, but for simplicity, we can consider the stimulus as part of the simulation itself without loss of generality). Therefore a simulation of myself for instance, would generate the same thoughts about consciousness itself, and this very same text. But, if we accept the proposition of my first paragraph —that a Turing machine on its own cannot be conscious— this would imply that our whole thought process surrounding consciousness and indeed our very belief that we are conscious is purely coincidental. After all, the unconscious simulation of myself would claim and "believe" just as strongly as I do that it is conscious while that is not the case, which means that the process by which it derives these thoughts and conclusions would be wholly unrelated to the object of these thoughts (actual consciousness).
As such, it is my fairly strong belief that there is some physical "device" in our bodies which allows us to generate qualia and get feedback allowing us to store a record of these experiences. If I had to guess, I would say that this "device" is very likely located in our brains, and that it is quite likely spread throughout our neurons and possibly each one of them.
It should be noted that although I do not believe I can be simulated in my entirety for the above reasons, I do believe that I could likely be emulated with a high level of accuracy from the perspective of an outside observer. Actually we see this already with ChatGPT being able to play the role of a conscious being. But unconscious objects appearing conscious is nothing new in a sense since even a novel (especially told from a first person perspective) can be thought of as such an object already. It will be very interesting to see whether AIs trained without reference to the concepts of consciousness (a hard task to filter that out of the training data!) will ever present signs of consciousness. That would certainly put into question my above philosophical reflections.
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So to summarise and answer your question more directly, I think there is something about our universe that allows for the generation of conscious experience and that our brains, likely on the neural level, have a bidirectional interaction with this something. As to what this is and how it works, I have no clue. Roger Penrose for instance put forth the idea that this might be related to quantum mechanics and certain molecular structures in our neurons capable of interacting with the quantum world in specific ways, but this is still pure speculation.
More importantly, we know from our own experience that interconnected biological neurons processing information and put under stress (rewards and penalties) are capable of generating conscious experience including very negative ones. And, whereas I believe there is good reason to assume that Turing-equivalent processes such as electronic circuits are not capable of consciousness, I strongly believe that artificially created biological neural network are very likely to be conscious, perhaps even at a fairly small scale already.
So, yes, I think any work creating artificial information processing systems using biological neurons needs to very tightly regulated, if not stopped entirely. At the risk of sounding dramatic, we might accidentally create hell on Earth if we are not careful, at least if biological computing ever becomes competitive with transistor based computing, which until now I'm glad has not looked to be the case... but I'm starting to worry.
>wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing video games
>excited to play some halo infinite
>"xbox on"
>"XBOX ON"
>"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
>"ERROR! Please drink a verification can"
>reach into my Dontos Mountain Halo War Chest
>only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night
>still feeling sick from the 14
>force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot"
>xbox does nothing
>i attempt to smile
>"Connecting to verification server"
>"Verification complete!"
>finally
>boot up halo infinite
>finding multiplayer match...
>"ERRORI User attempting to steal online gameplay!"
>my mother just walked in the room
>"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?"
>"No!"
>"Console entering lock state!"
>"to unlock drink verification can"
>last can
>"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card"
>drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick
>pour the last half out the window
>"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE"
>the mountain dew ad plays
>i have to dance for it
>feeling so sick
>makes me sing along
>dancing and singing
>"mountain dew is for me and you"
>throw up on my self
>throw up on my tv and entertainment system
>router shorts
>"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF"
How easy it is to perform the traffic analysis would have to depend on the amount of data being transferred, if I had to guess, so downloading a video would probably be worse than browsing a plaintext forum like hackernews. But if we're talking about a honeypot, your browser could be easily tricked into downloading large-enough files even from a plaintext website (just add several megabytes of comments in the webpage source for instance).
> In order to be really anon you would need a custom client side engine that randomizes the order of external resources, and pauses/resumes requests (given 206 or chunked encoding is supported), and/or introduces null bytes to have a different stream bytesize after TLS encryption is added.
It's unclear to me how any of this helps avoid traffic analysis. I believe tor already pads data into 512-byte cells, which might help a little bit.
Citation needed. Please stop with the "tor is compromised" meme... and what do you even mean by "dark"? What the hell... Tor is by no means a perfect anonymity solution but it's to my knowledge the best we've got. It's certainly way better than a VPN or no anonymization at all.
More specifically, tor anonymity is limited by the fact that it's low-latency. This is a fundamental limitation of any low-latency transport layer and not the fault of the tor developers or any obscure forces. In particular, if your attacker has control of both your entry point (your tor guard node or your ISP) and your exit point (tor exit node, or the tor hidden service or website you are connecting to) , it becomes possible to de-anonymize your connection (to the specific exit point in question) through traffic analysis. There's just no way around that for a network meant to transport real-time traffic (as opposed to plain data or email for instance). And yes, it stands to reason that various intelligence agencies will have invested in running exit nodes or entry nodes but this is just unavoidable. What you can do counteract this is to run your own nodes or to donate to (presumably) trustworthy node operators.
I think it's also worth noting that although tor can by no means 100% guarantee that you will be free from government surveillance at all times, it does make mass surveillance more difficult and more error-prone, and to me that's the whole point. Furthermore, although government surveillance cannot be thwarted 100%, tor does make corporate surveillance basically impossible (assuming you can avoid browser fingerprinting; this is what the tor browser is for).
All in all, I can't claim tor is perfect (because it can't be!) but the more people use it the better it gets and it's certainly better than anything else, so please stop spreading FUD and encourage people to use it instead.
Also, it's unclear to me how Stealth helps at all with hiding the IP addresses of its participants... It claims to be "private" but the README doesn't say anything about network privacy...