EA - Abandoning functionalism: Some intuition pumps by Alfredo Parra

The Nonlinear Library

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: Abandoning functionalism: Some intuition pumps, published by Alfredo Parra on July 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. There seems to be a widely-held view in popular culture that no physicist really understands quantum mechanics. The meme probably gained popularity after Richard Feynman famously stated in a lecture (transcribed in the book "The Character of Physical Law") "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics", though many prominent physicists have expressed a similar sentiment. Anyone aware of the overwhelming success of quantum mechanics will recognize that the seeming lack of understanding of the theory is primarily about how to interpret its ontology, and not about how to do the calculations or run the experiments, which clearly many physicists understand extremely well. But even the ontological confusion is debatable. With the proliferation of interpretations of quantum mechanics - each varying in terms of, among others, which classical intuitions should be abandoned - at least some physicists seem to think that there isn't anything weird or mysterious about the quantum world. So I suspect there are plenty of physicists who would politely disagree that it's not possible to really understand quantum mechanics. Sure, it might take them a few decades of dedicated work in theoretical physics and a certain amount of philosophical sophistication, but there surely are physicists out there who (justifiably) feel like they grok quantum mechanics both technically and philosophically, and who feel deeply satisfied with the frameworks they've adopted. Carlo Rovelli (proponent of the relational interpretation) and Sean Carroll (proponent of the many-worlds interpretation) might be two such people. This article is not about the controversial relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness. Instead, I think there are some lessons to learn in terms of what it means and feels like to understand a difficult topic and to find satisfying explanations. Maybe you will relate to my own journey. See, for a long time, I thought of consciousness as a fundamentally mysterious aspect of reality that we'd never really understand. How could we? Is there anything meaningful we can say about why consciousness exists, where it comes from, or what it's made of? Well, it took me an embarrassingly long time to just read some books on philosophy of mind, but when I finally did some 10 years ago, I was captivated: What if we think in terms of the functions the brain carries out, like any other computing system? What if the hard problem is just ill-defined? Perhaps philosophical zombies can teach us meaningful things about the nature of consciousness? Wow. Maybe we can make progress on these questions after all! Functionalism in particular - the position that any information system is conscious if it computes the appropriate outputs given some inputs - seemed a particularly promising lens. The floodgates of my curiosity were opened. I devoured as much content as I could on the topic - Dennett, Dehaene, Tononi, Russell, Pinker; I binge-read Brian Tomasik's essays and scoured the EA Forum for any posts discussing consciousness. Maybe we can preserve our minds by uploading their causal structure? Wow, yes! Could sufficiently complex digital computers become conscious? Gosh, scary, but why not? Could video game characters matter morally? I shall follow the evidence wherever it leads me. The train to crazy town had departed, and I wanted to have a front-row seat. Alas, the excitement soon started to dwindle. Somehow, the more I learned about consciousness, the more confused and dissatisfied I felt. Many times in the past I'd learned about a difficult topic (for instance, in physics, computer science, or mathematics) and, sure, the number of questions would mul...