Mathematical Model Suggests That Human Consciousness Is Noncomputable

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "One of the most profound advances in science in recent years is the way researchers from a variety of fields are beginning to formulate the problem of consciousness in mathematical terms, in particular using information theory. That's largely thanks to a relatively new theory that consciousness is a phenomenon which integrates information in the brain in a way that cannot be broken down. Now a group of researchers has taken this idea further using algorithmic theory to study whether this kind of integrated information is computable. They say that the process of integrating information is equivalent to compressing it. That allows memories to be retrieved but it also loses information in the process. But they point out that this cannot be how real memory works; otherwise, retrieving memories repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay. By assuming that the process of memory is non-lossy, they use algorithmic theory to show that the process of integrating information must noncomputable. In other words, your PC can never be conscious in the way you are. That's likely to be a controversial finding but the bigger picture is that the problem of consciousness is finally opening up to mathematical scrutiny for the first time."

Comments

Memories do decay

[tepples]

But they point out that this cannot be how real memory works; otherwise, retrieving memories repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay.

Memories do decay upon recall. People misremember something and convince themselves that the misremembered notion was correct.

Re:Memories do decay

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure you are remembering that wrong.

Re:Memories do decay

[hey!]

Exactly right. Neuroscientists have shown memories are distorted every time you use them; thus memories that are recalled frequently are less accurate than those infrequently recalled. [citation]

Memory is non-lossy? Research suggests otherwise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Retrieving memories repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay is talked about in a radiolab episode.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/

Eyewitness accounts have been proven to be wrong over and over again. The assumption of a non-lossy memory is just false.

Memory is more like dynamic RAM.

[Kazoo the Clown]

Not retrieving memories is what causes them to decay. Ever hear of refresh?

My PC cannot be conscious the way I am

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Because I'm a human being and it's a PC. Duh...

I think machines will eventually acquire their own form of consciousness, totally separate from ours. and I reckon it's just fine, and much more exciting in fact than trying to replicate our humanity in hardware that's just not compatible with it.

Bad syllogism

[Geoffrey.landis]

Baloney. What a stupid argument. Here is it, summarized:
1. Here is one mathematical model of a way that memories could work.
2. This method would be computable.
3. But that would mean memories degrade the more you remember them
4. But memories don't degrade the more you remember them.
5. Therefore memories are not computable.

Assignment for the student: find the flaw in this argument.

Re:Bad syllogism

[ArcadeMan]

The flaw is as followed: the summary is missing a crucial step, which would read as such: "6. Profits!".

Re:Bad syllogism

[MobyDisk]

The error is in step 5. It should be:
5. Therefore, that mathematical model is incorrect.
They found a contradiction, so the model must be revised.

Re:Bad syllogism

[Thagg]

In fact, it's pretty clear that 4. is incorrect. There was a fascinating recent study.

There is a drug that you can give somebody (or in this experiment, a rat) that will prevent it from creating new memories. They trained the rat to solve a maze, and it did it just fine. They gave the rat the drug, and it solved the maze perfectly. Once. After that, it couldn't do it again.

Implying that when you remember something, that very process of remembering removes the original memory,and it has to be created again. It will be different the second time; colored by your current experience. The more times you remember something, the more you are remembering the previous memory, not the original event.

A reference is

Re:Bad syllogism

[maxwell demon]

A reference is

I think you remembered your reference once too often. ;-)

Re:Bad syllogism

[ShanghaiBill]

The flaw is as followed: the summary is missing a crucial step, which would read as such: "6. Profits!".

They are missing an even more fundamental step: "0. Define consciousness." The definition they give, "a property of a physical system, its 'integrated information'," is a definition that I have never heard before, and I doubt most people would agree with. Before you try to explain something, you need to have a definition that people accept, and you have to also have a consensus that the phenomenon actual exists. There is some evidence that consciousness is an illusion, and that people make decisions unconsciously, and then rationalize them after the fact. Arguing about "consciousness" is like arguing about "free will" or arguing about whether people have a soul.

Re:Bad syllogism

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I assume that this depraved recourse to 'the empiricism' will soil my hands in the minds of the mathematicians; but we can and have demonstrated the degradation of memories during the recall process. That area of research(while it has serious applications to memory disorders, trauma treatment, and basic research in neuroscience) is practically a party game of 'who can achieve the most ridiculously false 'memories' in experimental subjects the fastest?

They might as well have just used some Schneier Facts in place of the paper: "SHA-256 is a hash algorithm, and not reversible." "Bruce Schneier uses SHA-256 as a compression algorithm for Alice and Bob's shared secret." "Therefore Bruce Schneier is not computable, except by himself."

It would have taken about ten minutes to email anybody in the psych department and this all could have been avoided. Good Work!

Re:Bad syllogism

[MightyMartian]

You can, however, blame ignorant fucktards who don't understand the data OR the theory who go around acting like self-righteous assholes when a scientific theory intrudes on their ideological leanings.

Re:Bad syllogism

[colinrichardday]

There is some evidence that consciousness is an illusion, and that people make decisions unconsciously, and then rationalize them after the fact [about.com].

But how could we rationalize about stuff if we weren't conscious?

Re:Bad syllogism

[queazocotal]

An interesting argument is that it's basically the same way we do anything else.
Numerous studies have shown that if you for-example watch someone moving their arm, you partially understand this by using the same area of your brain that deals with your arms. Same with emotion - microexpressions where you have a fleeting subtle echo of expressions on others faces which aids your understanding - botox actually can impair your ability to perceive well the emotions of others.

Consciousness - or more accurately the illusion of a self can be reasonably understood as the reuse of an evolutionary device originally used to understand others actions. When applied to ourselves, this guesses our 'intent' from internal actions, and provides reasons and justifications for actions, which may be entirely specious.

For example, direct brain stimulation does not 'feel' like an external input - it feels like a 'natural' thought that you had - and people will often rationalise reasons for the most unusual behaviour due to direct brain stimulation, rather than the simple answer 'you applied a pulse of electricity to my brain' - because that's not how it feels.

http://brainsciencepodcast.com... - is interesting on this exact topic.

misapplied mathematics

[Mr. Slippery]

One of the most profound advances in bullshitting in recent years is the way researchers from a variety of fields are beginning to misuse mathematical terms in order to give their ideas a facade of intellectual responsibility. Since no one has yet come up with an agreed-upon definition of what this "consciousness" is as an objective observable phenomenon, trying to talk about it in mathematical terms is nothing more than intellectual masturbation.

Retrieving memories causes decay?

[Verdatum]

"retrieving them repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay"

Ouch. Just. Ouch. No. Noooo. NOOOOO.

There is so much wrong with this statement I don't even know where to start. It implies that the memory is overwritten with the memory of recalling the memory, which is a huge and ridiculous assumption. Memory likely works much more like ant paths. The details that are recalled more frequently are reinforced, and can be remembered longer. It could also be compared to a caching algorithm; details used more often are less likely to be lost, or need fewer hints to retrieve them.

And then using this assumption to declare something as non-computable demonstrates a lack of understanding of the concept of computability. The only way that conciousness could be non-computable would be if there is a supernatural element to it. Otherwise, the fact that it exists means it must be computable.

Re:Physically impossible

[drxenos]

No. All Turing complete means is a universe Turing machine can execute anything any other Turing state machine can. People misunderstand "Turing complete" can think it means someone that is Turing complete can do "anything." That is NOT what it means.

I thought memories do decay

[TsuruchiBrian]

That allows memories to be retrieved but it also loses information in the process. But they point out that this cannot be how real memory works; otherwise, retrieving memories repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay.

I remember hearing a radiolab episode on NPR talking about how memories actually get modified every time you recall them.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/

Maybe the radiolab episode is completely wrong, but I don't think it's fair to assume memories are lossless without providing some evidence of this.

Re:Memory is non-lossy? Research suggests otherwis

[frog_strat]

Hmmm. Do you find yourself occasionally having to re-learn your address or phone number ?

Re:Ghost in the machine?

[VernonNemitz]

"Non-computable" does not mean "non-copy-able". In other words, consider the sort of consciousness associated with recognizing oneself in a mirror. Humans are not the only animals that can do that. Among those that can are quite a few other primates, dolphins, elephants, some species of birds (certain parrots), and even the octopus. So, think about that in terms of brain structure: Birds have a variant on the basic "reptilian brain", elephants and dolphins have the "mammalian brain" extension of the reptilian brain, chimps and gorillas have the "primate brain" extension of the mammalian brain, and the octopus brain is in an entirely different class altogether (the mollusk family includes clams and snails). Yet Nature found ways to give all of those types of data-processing equipment enough consciousness for self-recognition. And after you include however-many extraterrestrial intelligences there might be, all across the Universe, well, anyone who thinks "no variant of computer hardware will ever be able to do that" is just not thinking clearly.

Sounds like utter bullshit

[Animats]

Here's a a critique. (It's on arxiv; no need to sign up for "Medium")

The paper isn't impressive. It make the assumption that human (other mammals, too?) memory isn't compressed, and is somehow "integrated" with all other information. We've been through this before. Last time, the buzzword was "holographic". We've been here before.

The observation that damage to part of the brain may not result in the loss of specific memories still seems to confuse many philosophers and neurologists. That shouldn't be mysterious at this point. A compact disk has the same property. You can obscure a sizeable area on a CD without making it unreadable. There's redundancy in the data, but it's a lot less than 2x redundant. The combination of error correction and spreading codes allows any small part of the disk to be unreadable without losing any data. (Read up on how CDs work if you don't know this. It's quite clever. First mass-market application of really good error correction.)

no Ghost_no "singularity"_only sci-fi

[globaljustin]

And after you include however-many extraterrestrial intelligences there might be, all across the Universe, well,

Then you're in science fiction land...woo hoo! I like scifi as much as the next /.er but your imaginations of the possible existence of a civilization that can fully digitize continuous data is worthless to a **scientific discussion**

That's the problem. Hard AI, "teh singularity", and the "question of consciousness" are so polluted in the literature by non-tech philosophers throughout history that the notion of ***falsifiability*** of computation theory get's tossed aside in favor of TED-talk style bullshit.

Falsifiability kills these theories *every time* and hopefully this research in TFA will help break the cycle.

To be science it must be able to be tested. It must be a premise that is capable of being proven or disproven. "hard AI" proponents like Kurzweil and the "singularity" believers ignore this part of science.

So happy to see this research

Re:no Ghost_no "singularity"_only sci-fi

[xevioso]

I hereby bestow upon you a Ph.D. in Pedantry.

Re:no Ghost_no "singularity"_only sci-fi

[ultranova]

Then you're in science fiction land...woo hoo! I like scifi as much as the next /.er but your imaginations of the possible existence of a civilization that can fully digitize continuous data is worthless to a **scientific discussion**

To put it bluntly, this entire study is worthless as science. We don't know how human mind works. Should we ever know, we'd then have the oh so fun task of disentangling accidents of biology from fundamental underlaying limits. And because we don't know how the human mind works, we have no way of knowing whether a particular model presents it accurately or at all (however, any theory that claims human memory is in any way perfect is certainly off to a bad start), thus any conclusions based on it are firmly in the land of wild mass guessing.

To be science it must be able to be tested. It must be a premise that is capable of being proven or disproven. "hard AI" proponents like Kurzweil and the "singularity" believers ignore this part of science.

Well, the complexity of behaviour of the Universe has been increasing since at least the Big Bang in a virtuous circle. Is there some reason why the trend would stop, either now or at some future point? If not, then it seems like singularity would be the inevitable result.

Anti-AI isn't science, it's just the ancient belief about the supernatural specialness of human soul, typically dressed in arguments from lack of imagination and often seasoned with a helping of ego. Nature has no way of telling between "artificial" and "natural", after all, so it's incapable of allowing natural intelligent creatures (us) yet disallowing artificial ones.

Re:no Ghost_no "singularity"_only sci-fi

[ultranova]

You can disagree with how these guys came to their conclusion, but it's the exact same conclusion others, by different means, reached decades ago: computation is insufficient.

Computation is insufficient to solve all problems, yes. The questions are: is anything capable of solving all problems? That is, is there something beyond computation? And if there is, does human mind include it? And if it does, is it something essential or does it just give you an extra edge in some special situations?

That's right. We don't. Of course, we don't need to know how it works in order to identify what does not.

So far, no one has demonstrated any ability of human mind that couldn't be replicated through computation. That, of course, doesn't mean none exists. Knowing how mind works would would presumably allow us to enumerate over all its capabilities and settle the matter.

Stop living in a fantasy land and learn to embrace reality. It's much more interesting than Kurzweil's video-game afterlife and Spielberg's sex-bots.

And now we're back to meaningless rhetoric.

No it isn't

[multi io]

I hardly understand a goddamn word of TFA and have never heard of the "Integrated information theory", but I know that TFA's proposition must be false because the brain is based on the laws of physics, which are computable. Q.e.d.