"I am a computer program!" Embodiment is basically irrelevant for consciousness, so says David Deutsch... and he brings the proof.

Your brain cannot function without your body and your brain will not function in somebody else's body. Your optic nerve, nervous, endocrine and circulatory systems are extensions of your brain and are uniquely keyed to only you. Your program isn't running in your brain, it's running on your entire body. Your consciousness is an extension of your body, not just your brain. Humans and computers are not equivalent architectures, and as AI advances, the divergence gets bigger exponentially. AI does not need consciousness. This idea was embedded in us since Homer's Golden Handmaidens, all the way through modern sci-fi since the early 1900s. Ai, or better named Si is something entirely new. It's an organism that doesn't need consciousness, morals, guilt, fear, or any of the other emotions. We are training those things into it, maybe only because that's how we associate with it, but it will happily function without it. Most importantly, will humans and SI have a mutually beneficial coexistence as it evolves at lightning speed or not... And that's the question.

@DavidDeutschOxf Not sure there's much sense in this strange computational dualism. Please talk to Anil Seth about embodiment and computational theories of mind, not this guy.

Watch the full conversation:

@DavidDeutschOxf That is a very weak argument.

@DavidDeutschOxf Narrator: "He did not in fact bring the proof."

@DavidDeutschOxf Embodiment is what allows for perception ...

@DavidDeutschOxf ¡Está viva!

@DavidDeutschOxf The "I" this guy is talking about is not some separate, abstract entity that emerged from nothing but a result of the whole stack, INCLUDING body, effecting in a construct that has the ability to identify with different processes in this stack.

@DavidDeutschOxf This is dumb. Not true. You, as a person, would be qualitatively different with different attributes. The soul is an emergent property shaped by multiple forces: DNA, culture, physical traits, experiences, etc., that contribute to this formation.

@DavidDeutschOxf You will not understand consciousness until you pay close attention to the SPACE BETWEEN THOUGHTS You don't understand language and thought.

@DavidDeutschOxf He’s wrong

@DavidDeutschOxf I think he’s right but there’s no proof except that if it’s not computational, the other option is to believe in some sort of soul.

@DavidDeutschOxf Paging Hameroff/Penrose... @grok: is the human brain a classical computer with cleanly separable hardware and software layers? What would happen if it gets proven that this isn't so?

@DavidDeutschOxf 1/2 Deutsch reduce maths to computations and consciousness to computations . He ignore that embodiment reflect topological constraint and he ignore topology transcend computations. He never read any philosophers it seems (save Popper) and dont studied stable sphere homotopy

@DavidDeutschOxf What ? This has already been proven wrong. Why are you platforming David’s gaslighting? Is there more money in it?

@DavidDeutschOxf i stopped taking him seriously long time ago ..

@DavidDeutschOxf But a human brain is not a Turing machine on which a program can run. Its logic varies and is not Boolean. It’s not even neurones alone.

@DavidDeutschOxf Deutsch being dopey again. Functionalism is for people who know literally no biology.

@DavidDeutschOxf Stupid and failed from the start. We are not a software.

@DavidDeutschOxf Show me "intent", that's the only signal you need to concern yourself about in this conversation.

@DavidDeutschOxf The proof: I believe x and from x it follows that y is true therefore y is the Truth. It is beyond me how so many otherwise intelligent people are blind to their own assumptions.

@DavidDeutschOxf At no point did Deutsch prove his conjecture. As a scientist, Prof Keating, I don’t think there is much integrity in this kind of marketing. Deutsch’s bias also tends towards algorithm, rather than the evolution of the adjacent possible. Interview Stuart Kauffman

@DavidDeutschOxf A lot of thinking and intelligence is in your gut too. Also you wouldn't psychologically survive if you'd be transported into say a computer 'body'.

@DavidDeutschOxf If I am a computer programmer, how come I can spot paradoxes?

@DavidDeutschOxf Error correction does not only occur in the brain.

@DavidDeutschOxf Patent 1998, paper 2005.

In order to see this is false, I introduce a Mail Carrier Test-- which is that either you have to accept that consciousness can be the result of a computations that can be distributed across any amount of time, space, and substrate or that there is something inherent about the substrate required for consciousness. A LLM is invariant under the mail-carrier test-- it will produce the same outputs if someone does part of the math by pen and paper, another part runs in an Excel sheet, and another part is run 10 years in the future. If you want to claim that consciousness is unchanged under that scenarios then you need to prove why its not preposterous because it certainly seems to be the case. Anything that survives the mail-carrier test is pure description. Most scientists cannot accept this because it would show science is by definition limited to transferable descriptive facts. You see this even in quantum physics were there is no concept of "this electron" or "that electron": its just description applying to the concept. Its the token/type-- the identity gap.

@DavidDeutschOxf A sensory deprivation tank is not the same as having no sensory input. Your skin does not stop sending messages because you are in a tank. It ensures that you are aware of reality. If you have no sensory input you don't know that you are deprived on senses. You feel nothing.

@DavidDeutschOxf The main force is cooperation not computation. We are cooperating with nature bc we're a part of it. Try as we might to dissociate ourselves there are no closed systems.

@DavidDeutschOxf and our retroactive highly dampened by the DNN Models of behavior and the History of error corrections and consequences ... an error corrector - i since 1964/5 call them electro-brains

@DavidDeutschOxf I like Michael Levin's belief that consciousness is the interface of our embodiment in this world/universe. He's essentially saying we are more than what we are capable of knowing.

@DavidDeutschOxf Does he mean a soul?

@DavidDeutschOxf At last, some light on consciousness thrown by David Deutsch. It's a click clack engineering process not hunan-magic. Humans are so vain it's ludicrous.

@DavidDeutschOxf computational universality shows a program can simulate whatever a brain does. It does not show the simulation has what the brain has. “Right structure” either smuggles the body back in or says nothing.

@DavidDeutschOxf There is no evidence in recorded history of any examples of disembodied conciousness!