u/GeorgeBird1

Back in 2020, I made this video exploring a consciousness thought experiment I called "the chalkboard problem" --- the idea is that if you take a conscious artificial neural network as a premise, then its computations can be carried out by hand on a chalkboard. Thus, if it remained conscious, where in the system would it exist?

A lot of debate surrounds the mind-body problem and the physicality of consciousness—is it tied to matter itself, to particular neural circuitry, to a universal field, etc.? This questions whether it is the physical chalk, the very process of calculating the algorithm, the maths itself or something else physical or not.

It's an old, rough-around-the-edges video with 'solutions' I no longer necessarily agree with, but I hope the core argument remains interesting and more pertinent than it was at the time! Hopefully, it carves out an interesting position to ponder: whether maths itself is sufficient, independent of whatever substrate performs the calculation.

[One thing that may catch your eye, too, if you're familiar with my isotropic foundational bias work (Zenodo Paper), is that isotropic-tanh actually makes a subtle appearance in the first video. This functional form for activation functions is something I've been quietly toying with since around 2018/2019 alongside ideas surrounding consciousness, from which it emerged. I've since pursued this academically, such as the Spotlight Resonance Method to explore effectively artificial qualia - perhaps of interest to this community? Basically, current activation functions may actually hypercubically distort internal representations of AI, injecting unnecessary structure that damages their interrelated organisation]

I hope this may be a curious position to stimulate some discussion, thanks 😄