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Comment by ffwacom | Hacker News Reader

Don’t see a reason for it to be limited to just life either.

How so? Is it because you believe computers can be conscious? I think life is necessary for consciousness personally.

> I think life is necessary for consciousness personally.

I suspect you would need to define life in a fairly leading fashion for this to be the case. Can you say what you mean by "life" here?

Unfortunately i'm not knowledgable on biology at all :P but i will at least say i think you'd need biological processes for life and not just electricity.

Is consciousness a binary state? There are many examples that suggest it is not: toddlers, the dream state, computer programs, communal endeavors (such as a scientific inquiry), not to mention animals. If consciousness is something that is a question of degree, it makes sense to think of the entire universe being conscious to some degree or another. I’m not a very spiritual person, but I find this train of thought hard to avoid.

some Hindu historically (maybe presently?) considered there to be to something like 20+ levels of consciousness.

Some argue that consciousness is rooted in an unknown or misunderstood physical property of matter.

That for some reason disregard Ockham's wise words...

_shrug_ I have no skin in the game, so to speak, but I can almost imagine a scenario where it might be simpler to accept that consciousness is a physical property of matter than to accept that consciousness doesn’t exist.

IIRC the enuntiation of famous Razor, you must not introduce extra entities in a gratuitous and unnecessary way. And this is exactly what I find extrange: we don't know enough about how natural minds work yet, computers are still far from approximating the minds of simplest organism and yet there's people that says it's an impossible task. Come on! Observe first, start small, see where problems arise. What's the point in making up unknown physics for a problem that we don't have yet?

https://neurosphere.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/physical-consci...

My opinion was formed after reading more like that and realizing that it's a lot of circular reasoning: cursory observation of reality, assigning labels and, when labels doesn't fit reality, blaming reality instead of their own ability to use labels.

How does it disregard Occam's Razor?

To me it's more mystical to invoke an outside, actual material reality existing, separate from our observer perspective. How can it not be the same?

Proposing a new unknown entities to explain a problem that we're not sure even exists does indeed disregard it.

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