Comment by evanb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanb | Hacker News Reader

It seems extremely plausible to me that any matter that is organized enough to support meaningful arbitrary computation (ie. not Seth Lloyd's "it's computing it's own evolution" kind of computation) would share some kind of similarity of organization, or at least fall into a small number of phases, with an order parameter that somehow reduces to computation / unit volume.

That makes me think of "Action, Or the Fungibility of Computation" (1998) [0] wherein Toffoli argues that what the physical quantity known as "action" amounts to is computational spacetime density.

    [0]    PDF link in the upper right corner of http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.2410

But the problem is not computation, the problem is consciousness. I think we all agree that our level of general intelligence can be achieved "simply" by putting stuff together in the correct order. But consciousness? Why is it even there? Why is there something that it's like to be us?

I don't know. It's not clear to me what consciousness means, but if forced me to take a stance, I'd give a Hofstaderian response and say that it's a matter of degrees, and that perhaps consciousness is the experience of processing information. More than that, I don't think it can be said to be "even there"---or otherwise it's something outside of the content, arrangement, or behavior of our constituent matter.

I should add that he gets into very practical details, like how much should one charge for a fixed amount of computational capacity, in 1998 (before AWS etc. :P).

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