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.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. In the 1980s, Geoffrey Hinton was one of the scientists who invented backpropagation, the algorithm that enables the training of deep neural networks. Backpropagation was key to the success of deep learning and its widespread use today. But Hinton, who is one of the most celebrated artificial intelligence scientists of our time, thinks it is time that we think beyond backpropagation and look for other, more efficient ways to train neural networks. And like many other scientist, he draws inspiration from the human brain.