Consciousness qua Mortal Computation
arXiv:2403.03925v15 citationsh-index: 1
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis
This addresses a foundational issue in philosophy of mind and AI, potentially redefining computational theories of consciousness, though it appears incremental by building on Hinton's concept.
The paper tackles the problem of whether consciousness can be explained as a Turing computation, concluding that it cannot and must instead be understood as mortal computation, as recently proposed by Geoffrey Hinton.
Computational functionalism posits that consciousness is a computation. Here we show, perhaps surprisingly, that it cannot be a Turing computation. Rather, computational functionalism implies that consciousness is a novel type of computation that has recently been proposed by Geoffrey Hinton, called mortal computation.