Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

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Alice: We can agree the brain is conscious, yes?

Bob: Of course.

Alice: But what if you scaled up all the neurons in the brain a factor of 2? Would it still be conscious?

Bob: Sure, if it's the same system running the same way. There's no reason to expect it to matter.

Alice: Then if it was a factor 4 larger?

Bob: Absolutely. Human brains are sized as they are as a matter of evolutionary coincidence. Bird neurons are much more compact than ours, and still manage much of the same work.

Alice: Right, but if every neuron also contained chloroplasts?

Bob: Which did what? There isn't much light there.

Alice: Nothing, they're completely ancillary.

Bob: Then yes, evidently it's still the same system... at what point does this become a hard question?

Alice: Just hold on a few orders of magnitude...

This scaling argument only works if the consituent molecules, atoms and particles also scale proportionally.

If you scale the system but keep one end tied down it isn't the same system.

Presumably the grandparent is thinking of organisms like Pando [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

Yes, that makes more sense. ta

No, it holds much more strongly than that. The idea that consciousness can only arise in neurons shaped exactly like human neurons—and not, say, slightly larger neurons like exist in many other animals, or neurons with slightly different energy-carrying chemicals, or whatever—is implausible, because evolution isn't goal-directed. Evolution didn't find the one true physical layout that leads to conscious experience, because evolutionary strategies fundamentally can't solve those sorts of problems.

I'm with you on this.

My reason for comment related purely to the looseness of the conversation, w.r.t. the word "scale", which, it seems I had misunderstood to mean an affine transform.

In light of this comment, I now see you were talking about some growth function or change in topology/structure.

Thanks for the clarification.

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