The hard problem of consciousness is an impassable obstacle given the set of tools that we have and, arguably, ever can have. If we grant that there is some level of physical description (chemical, atomic, sub-atomic, whichever) at which consciousness best adheres, what do we use to make the connection? Symbolic equations and theorems don't cut it, and that's pretty much all we've got. Physical systems are fully described by the collection of their measurable properties (positions, momenta, charges, etc)--there's no way to connect things going on "outside" with subjective experience.
What would an operator which turns a physical state into conscious experience spit out?
C|state> = ????
Can't write down e.g. "The perception of a red apple on a table". Red? Table? Just symbols. Consciousness and word-symbols are just too far apart.
>I think one of the communication challenges in this broad discussion is what is a "finance" person. Several people refer to them as people in Accounting (accountants) when I think they really mean Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A analysts).
Noted and agreed. I'm not well versed in finance lingo beyond what I learned by taking up a business analyst role. The distinction you mention was likely lost on me due to the fact that this division didn't really have an FP&A team and every accountant was given the title of "financial analyst".
Sure, FSS made projections, but those were all terrible. They were worth less to functional managers than the paper they had been printed on. A given year's labor forecast came in the form a single column of multimillion dollar (Ex)cells per cost center. No ability to dig in. Consistently low by ~10%. Did leadership get a bonus by expanding the business book over the course of a year? Who knows?!
FP&A was an afterthought for leadership. I was probably the only full-time FP&A employee (at an office with over 700 employees), yet I did not report to finance--I was under the program management umbrella for some reason. It didn't take long to recognize the potential value-add that our finance area could provide with a single change. Alas.
Appreciate the replies. You probably feel my pain better than I do.
>My personal hope is financial analysts get more tech savvy over time.
Probably won't happen and isn't important imo. If somebody can dig SQL/Python/R then somebody can get paid more to do something other than count beans (speaking here of lowest level financial analysts [accountants]; I was probably the only person at the division trying to make a meaningful financial forecast that was more detailed than a top level number with zero transparency. I started w/ python but wanted a COTS solution. Didn't want to babysit it.).
>Better use of databases would allow one spreadsheet with a database to store the changing inputs.
This is the key. The number one complaint of every other business area was that forecasts came in asynchronously and it was impossible to tell whether what had been added or removed was real. Hallway conversations took the place of structured data. That's fine for many things, but not for projections which determine whether we need to hire twenty more engineers or let go of a dozen.
The product that would've solved the problem (and then some) was IBM's TM1 (now "Planning Analytics powered by TM1"). My model worked well in TM1 and could've been extended to being better than a calculated model--the direct inputs from the dozens of IPTs could have been collected without the need for any math used to back out of numbers. No "model", merely the collection of demands of every program and every potential contract. The program teams already generated all of this data; finance threw most of it away while rolling it up.
TM1/PA has Excel plugins which render the change invisible to the financial analysts doing the work. Their job doesn't change but the organization can hoover up more data by at least an order of magnitude, breaking the cycle of relying upon opaque, top-level numbers that no other business area actually trusts.
The finance business area at the last large company I worked for was borderline ridiculous. The division I was employed at ran a billion in revenue through Excel sheets scattered across network drives. FSS had a nightmare of a week at the end of every quarter. I was given a promotion and a shift from engineering to business analysis with the goal of creating a model to predict workforce requirements for ongoing business and new contracts. After a few months of learning the ropes and the history of similar attempts, it became clear that the company already held a license for software suitable (perfect) for this goal and the finance area was already slowly working towards ditching the excel mess in favor of the sane solution.
By "slowly" I mean that they had been inching towards using the right tool for years, finding any and every excuse to abandon course. The corporate app dev unit explained to me that they were wary of working with the finance area of my division as finance had repeatedly gone 90% of the way to an improved tool only to bail out at the last minute, wasting time and money and leaving corp app managers the task of explaining why things fell through to their bosses.
The best (worst) excuse given by finance during my attempt to sort things out was after we were acquired by an even larger contractor. "We're not sure if <company> uses <software>, so we're going to need to put a complete halt on the shift." They weren't sure? It took me less than a minute to go to the acquiring corp's job req page and see that they were hiring admins/devs for the software in question. Ridiculous. Finance leadership could have made a single call to ask a single question, but rather than stepping out of the comfort zone they decided to scuttle a project which was all but guaranteed to improve their lives and the organization as a whole.
I'm close to 50/50 on whether the finance unit was doing something dishonest and wished to retain the control provided by using an opaque/incomprehensible system or if they were merely too afraid of any sort of change by virtue of their bean counting nature. Either way, they're probably still actively harming the company.
What would an operator which turns a physical state into conscious experience spit out?
C|state> = ????
Can't write down e.g. "The perception of a red apple on a table". Red? Table? Just symbols. Consciousness and word-symbols are just too far apart.