Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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The steps in an algorithm are also specific and guarantee that you will get the same result every time you follow those steps provided you're operating on the same data. The result you're pursuing is unambiguous: if you're using Djikstra you're trying to get the shortest distance between a source node and every other node in a graph, for instance.
Compare this with consciousness in general: if it is an algorithm, what goal is it being used to achieve? What would the steps even be?
Regarding the point on finitude, "discrete" might have been a more appropriate word. What I'm trying to get at is that people in this thread are playing so fast and loose with the word "algorithm" that the use of the word becomes incoherent '.
So I take it you're not a determinist? That's a whole conversation that's separate from this, but you should know there are a lot of secular people who don't believe in free will (e.g having a will independent of any casual relationships to physical reality). Secular people are generally deterministic, we believe that wills exist within physical reality, and that they exist in the same cause/effect relationship as everything else.
With enough information of the present, you could know everything a human will do in their lifetime, there's no will that exists outside of reality that is influencing reality (no will that is "free"). Instead, will is entirely casually linked, like everything else.
Put another way, you're guaranteed to get the same result every time you put a human in exactly the same situation. Even if there is true chaos in the universe (e.g pure randomness) that's a different situation every time you get a different random result.
The rejection of your thesis that consciousness is an algorithm is not a rejection of determimism. I have no doubt that all that exists is only material and the properties that emerge from it. The word algorithm makes no sense without a goal for it to be used to reach. Taking your paragraph about being able to predict everything a human will do in their lifetime with sufficient information (possible in principle, but intractable), what outcome would I be trying to achieve with this information? Is there some clear end state that the consciousness algorithm is optimized to reach?