(August 16, 2017 at 2:46 pm)Whateverist Wrote: There. Finished it. Consciousness is more than computation. Couldn't agree more.
I actually agree with this. The brain does not function by computing. That's not to say that it cannot compute. We can do maths and you can even do mathematical computations using synaptic trees, but that's not why the brain functions that way it does.
I came across this article recently and it has been immensely refreshing to see someone else argue that we should not attempt to explain the brain as if it was a computer.
The empty brain
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer
I argue that the brain is a biophysical, chemical self organising system, and like all other naturally occurring self organising systems it settles into a stable state by minimising disturbance of free-energy. So in the same way we won't get a useful understanding of consciousness if we see it merely as a form of computation. But it makes sense if we understand it as a way of helping the organism settle into a stable state over time.
We can understand both life and intelligence this way. Life is thermodynamically far from equilibrium, yet it self organised by minimising free energy. This is because an organism can produce more entropy over time by producing off-spring than by existing for a finite time and then dying off. In my last paper I demonstrated that a self organising agent that performs temporal sequence learning rather than a stimulus / response agent can choose costly actions that increase disturbance in the short term to settle into more stable states in the long term. In other words intelligence increases entropy over time even if it needs to minimise it in the short term.
Seen this way consciousness aids in increasing in entropy over time and is a natural result of the development of complexity through the arrow of time (e.g first there was radiation, then matter, stars, chemistry, planets, biology, life, intelligence, consciousness, societies, economies etc)
Explaining it in terms of quantum mechanics has no explanatory power at all and is a homunculus argument in that it pushes the explanation away to an ever smaller scale in order to avoid trying to understand it.