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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

At the very least, this seems to me to be a way to avoid the difficult and interesting issues of, and relating to, consciousness. I am not interested in debating whether it is possible to come up with some definition of the word "consciousness" such that one can say that even electrons have it; I am interested in how conscious, self-aware, theory-of-mind-holding minds work.

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"some DILLUTION of the word "consciousness"

Fixed that for you and ... agree on all counts.

I feel like while we can't explain consciousness yet, it isn't hard to make well supported conjectures about what it needs.

First, what I experience and call "consciousness" involves an awareness of a dynamical thing, me, for my environment (a gravitationally organized semi-2D place), myself externally (i.e. controllable hands and feet), my own internal responses to the environment (sensory perception, reinforcements, patterns), and the fact that this awareness on my part seems to be encoded with information that is used by my dynamical response generating apparatus.

I.e. Self-reflection does not seem to be segregated from other forms of information used to generate my responses: My awareness of self is not just in a spectator role, since it influences action.

The fact that self-awareness is not segregated from responses creates a wonderful side benefit: I can share my self-reflection by communicating to others about it.

If you took away any part of what I just described, I don't think I would continue operating in a way I understand as "consciousness" and my behaviors would certainly be very different. I don't think other's would describe me as "conscious" either.

And none of these seemingly necessary complicated and recursive pre-conditions for consciousness shout out as reasons to include individual electrons as co-conscious in any way.

Question: Assuming an electron has consciousness, what experiment would you attempt to falsify that?

I am anti-electron on this issue. :)

> Question: Assuming an electron has consciousness, what experiment would you attempt to falsify that?

This is the question that the article ends on -- the philosophers are entertaining the notion and looking for a testable hypothesis.

We're talking about a 1-qubit Turing test, essentially. I'm not about to take a position yay or nay, (I'm a mathematician, goddammit).

For an apparatus, we could capture individual electrons in a ring of magnetic bottles. Perform tests on individuals in the chambers, advance them in a "shift register" fashion, and repeat. Do any individuals show behavior that differentiates them? A clear signal of individuality would be a real shocker.

One thing we use for macroscopic beings is a "mirror test" -- can an electron recognize itself in a mirror? Again, sounds absurd, but the general question is considered an acceptable proof of consciousness.

The thing is, science is full of things without definition. There is no definition for energy. All we have is a bunch of book-keeping. Everytime we couldn't balance the books (ie. conserve energy) we just added another column to the accounting. But what is energy?

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_04.html

It is relevant to remember Kuhn's philosophy of science. Science is often thought as an institution that converges to truth. Kuhn, however, argues this is not true just like an organism gets away with evolving "good enough" features to ensure its survival, science merely evolves into "good enough" state that explains phenomenon of interest. Therefore, it is not necessary for science to converge into something that's close or even relevant to what is actually "true". Read: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#DeveScie

I really should read more philosophy, but I just can't cope with all the long sentences and curlicues of jargon... It's the same reason I struggle with algebra. Academia in general builds walls of language, it's not designed to be user friendly.

In my experience, reading reliable secondary sources is a bit easier than primary sources. E.g. for philosophy, I read Stanford's Plato encyclopedia of philosophy. For math, I read nlab or Wikipedia. Unfortunately, both of these will require you to be familiar with basic terminology and concepts of the field and that's where most people stop learning at. E.g. I'm a complete layman in physics and want to learn more but the jargon beyond basic mechanics (i.e. velocity, position, acceleration etc) might as well be Greek to me.

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