EA - Implementational Considerations for Digital Consciousness by Derek Shiller

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Implementational Considerations for Digital Consciousness, published by Derek Shiller on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post is a summary of my conclusions after a philosophical project investigating some aspects of computing architecture that might be relevant to assessing digital consciousness. I tried to approach the issues in a way that is useful to people with mainstream views and intuitions. Overall, I think that present-day implementational considerations should significantly reduce the probability most people assign to the possibility of conscious digital systems using current architectural and programming paradigms.The project was funded by the Long Term Future Fund.Key claims and synopses of the rationale for each:1. Details of the implementation of computer systems may be important to how confident we are about their capacity for consciousness.Experts are unlikely to come to agree that a specific theory of consciousness is correct and epistemic humility demands that we keep an open mind.Some plausible theories will make consciousness dependent on aspects of implementation.The plausible implementational challenges to digital consciousness should influence our overall assessment of the likelihood of digital consciousness.2. If computer systems are capable of consciousness, it is most likely that some theory of the nature of consciousness in the ballpark of functionalism is true.Brains and computers are composed of fundamentally different materials and operate at low levels in fundamentally different ways.Brains and computers share abstract functional organizations, but not their material composition.If we don't think that functional organizations play a critical role in assessing consciousness, we have little reason to think computers could be conscious.3. A complete functionalist theory of consciousness needs two distinct components: 1) a theory of what organizations are required for consciousness and 2) a theory of what it takes to implement an organization.An organization is an abstract pattern - it can be treated as a set of relational claims between the states of a system's various parts.Whether a system implements an organization depends on what parts it has, what properties belong to those parts, and how those properties depend on each other over time.There are multiple ways of interpreting the parts and states of any given physical system. Even if we know what relational claims define an organization, we need to know how it is permissible to carve up a system to assess whether the system implements that organization.4. There are hypothetical systems that can be interpreted as implementing the organization of a human brain that are intuitively very unlikely to be conscious.See examples in section 4.5. To be plausible, functionalism should be supplemented with additional constraints related to the integrity of the entities that can populate functional organizations.Philosophers have discussed the need for such constraints and some possible candidates, but there has been little exploration of the details of those constraints or what they mean for hypothetical artificial systems.There are many different possible constraints that would help invalidate the application of functional organizations to problematic systems in different ways.The thread tying together different proposals is that functional implementation is constrained by the cohesiveness or integrity of a system's component parts that play the roles in the implementations of functional organizations.Integrity constraints are independently plausible.6.) Several plausible constraints would prevent digital systems from being conscious even if they implemented the same functional organization as a human brain, supposing that they did so with current techni...