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Comment by knodi123 | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t know what the experience of a bit in memory flipping feels like.

The "feeling" could only be "experienced" via an enormous number of other "bits" flipping.

Neurons don't feel pain- they are how you experience pain.

I've heard the phrase "don't confuse the medium with the message", but this is like wondering if a pencil prefers writing fiction vs non fiction.

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It's possible that every component of an organism is recursively its own sentient system. In symbiosis, each component's first-person experience directs coordinating behavior for mutual benefit, though each component may be unable to observe the first-person experience of the other.

That's "possible" in the same way that wizards and vampires are possible - sure, I can't prove it's fake, but there's not a shred of evidence, plus it would upset everything we've learned about the universe.

Cells, tissues, and organs undertake a variety of self-maintenance behaviors without the direction of the brain. Although low-level behaviors like these are abundant, high-level examples also exist, like when an arm pulls away from a hot stove as soon as the signal reaches the spinal cord. The organism is a recursive system, with sub-systems behaving with varying degrees of autonomy while also depending on the larger system. The seat of consciousness possesses only a limited view.

You can use this approach to make complex behavior from simple rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture

That's not sentience. That's just life.

Neurons do not have a brain. They do not have emotions or feelings or thoughts. This conversation is so absurd that it's well into the realm of fantasy.

What causes a neuron to perform its functions if it isn't some brain? The answer would likely be physics, and I would say that first-person experience is fundamental in the physics if it exists at all.

Or somekind of electrical system, acting as a software layer on top of the hardware (neurons) layer. This electrical thing is what controls and orchestrates everything and also is our ego.

Neurons may not 'feel' pain per se, but it's entirely possible that the biological substrate on a chip would experience pain on some subset of the pin inputs, say if it recognized a condition that reliably led to a shutdown and reboot of the chip.

I'm not against this sort of research, but we shouldn't make assumptions about systems that we still understand relatively poorly.

> it's entirely possible that the biological substrate on a chip would experience pain on some subset of the pin inputs

Absolutely, but the guy I responded to suggested that "all physical processes involve a sensory component", which is utter insanity.

In quantum mechanics the act of observing always disturbs the observed; it's reasonable to call these disturbances 'senses' in the copenhagen interpretation of reality.

The term "observation" in explaining quantum mechanics is misleading and a layperson analogy, not the underlying reality which is closer to "inter-system interaction" or "interaction between a quantum system and its environment". No conscious observation necessary.

Interaction is also an analogy for what the mystery really is.

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