<story><title>Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity [pdf]</title><url>http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bmh100</author><text>For me, the key insight came from the following quote regarding Searle’s Chinese Room argument [1]:&lt;p&gt;*&amp;gt; And while it was true, the critics went on, that a giant lookup table wouldn’t “truly understand” its responses, that point is also irrelevant. For the giant lookup table is a philosophical fiction anyway: something that can’t even fit in the observable universe! If we instead imagine a compact, efficient computer program passing the Turing Test, then the situation changes drastically. For now, in order to explain how the program can be so compact and efficient, we’ll need to posit that the program includes representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning, and all sorts of other internal furniture that we would expect to find in a mind. Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance.&lt;p&gt;This captures what I had intuitively thought regarding the link between computation and consciousness: consciousness is some sort of sophisticated, elegant computation embodied in human physiology.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Chinese_room&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity [pdf]</title><url>http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>diego898</author><text>This is my favorite Scott Aaronson piece! It has been submitted to HN before, though quite some time ago. The discussion on that one is worth referencing here as well:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861825&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=2861825&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>