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Comment by Aaron2222 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the consciousness you and I experience isn't part of our brains at all, but is simply an emergent property of the processing and decision-making of our brains, something that sits 'atop' of that, and the same way that we'd intuitively expect an animal to experience a similar kind of consciousness, anything that processes data and performs decision-making has some kind of 'consciousness' that sits 'atop' it? But then the question would be why consciousness emerges 'on top of' the physical world and the people within it. And from a scientific, non-religious viewpoint, what reason would there be for that to happen.

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> anything that processes data and performs decision-making has some kind of 'consciousness' that sits 'atop' it?

There's an interesting thought experiment along these lines. Suppose someone builds a computer program which - when run with a specific input/environment - is intelligent, conscious, and feels pain and joy etc... .

Now, that computer program and even its inputs can be simulated effectively by 1's and 0's. The substrate shouldn't matter. So you can - in principle - run the exact same agorithmic decision-making process on the exact same inputs by getting a large group of people to write and edit 1's and 0's on pieces of paper according to well-defined rules and very simple interactions with the people around them.

Is this total process, now represented merely by marks on pieces of paper, a conscious being? Does it still feel pain and joy?

I find it both absurd and impossible to refute.

I think the absurdity might just stem from the different timescales involved when comparing human consciousness to the "paper consciousness". The differing timescales would make it difficult for us to communicate with or even comprehend such a "being".

But if we agree that consciousness is the product of a computation then the medium on which it is performed should not matter at all. And it should be equally absurd that our consciousness seems to arise from microscopic things conducting electrical and chemical signals. Which is probably a valid view point as well.

The thought experiment is a variation of the Chinese Room, by the way. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

I'd agree with all that. The idea of a "very slow consciousness" reminds me of Great-A'tuin in the Discworld novels, whose brain functions at a slow timescale. After centuries of study, telepaths were only able to glean that it is looking forward to something.

I think the absurdity also comes from the difficulty of directly measuring or evaluating the conscious process. You can ramp up the absurdity even more by fully encrypting the algorithm and destroying the encryption key. No other conscious being will ever be able to interact with that process's experience.

My thinking goes along similar lines. Perhaps consciousness is somehow a product of complex systems. Perhaps the Solar System, with its millions of gravitationally-coupled objects, is conscious? Perhaps the Sun, or Earth's mantle, are conscious too?

The question to me would be not

> what reason would there be for that to happen.

but rather, what mechanism could possibly be responsible for it? What mechanism carries it? If consciousness is real, and my subjective experience of reality a true thing, then there is a distinction between consciousness being present and not present. These must somehow be differently encoded in matter, or require that matter is embedded in some kind of meta-matter that bestows consciousness on it.

It's like EM waves requiring a "medium". First people thought it's waves through aether. Then we realised it's excitations of the magnetic and electric fields, so not strictly "material". But these are physical properties of the vacuum, i.e. "material" in that sense - real things. The medium is not material, but a property of vacuum.

What is the medium of consciousness?

> what reason would there be for that to happen.

in nature? chance

human made? morbid self curiosity?... and perhaps some kind of notion akin to colonialism: "i cant possibly hurt a LLM, its just a stateless function" while forgetting that new such systems can web search and thus their state is global.

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