What is it like to be a smartphone? | Hacker News Reader

What is it like to be a smartphone?

roughtype.com

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What is it like to be the Internet?

That structure resembles our brain: a reactive, resilient, shifting network of connections among billions of individual human brains using smartphones and other technological devices, storing, aggregating and routing information in complex and arbitrary ways. If consciousness is to be found in our technology, I wouldn't look at the individual smartphone, but at the network of all smartphones.

Could society be a body, the internet its nerves and the economy its blood?

You've got to put people in there somewhere.

The brain cells?

Lymph system.

People are the virus

We’re the mitochondria.

The DNA.

You're asking if a metaphor could be reality. Obviously not ... it's just a metaphor.

100%. I disagree with the article in that there’s nothing inherently mysterious or “hard” (like the “hard” problem of consciousness) in the inner machinations of a smartphone. In the inner machinations of a mind, yes, but not in a smartphone. Everything that goes on within it is designed and controlled and can be explained by a human.

Large networks, e.g. the brain or the Internet, on the other hand, are exponentially more complex and so offer the possibility of being unexplainable when looking at certain behaviors. A recursive problem in a sense.

I largely agree with you, but answer the reducibility problem. At what point does a network become complex enough to form consciousness? I think the writer of this article likely believes that there is no such point, that all information processing is consciously experienced phenomenon on a sliding scale of complexity

When it understands that it is a network and can rework itself and its surroundings, working as a homogenous unit interacting with its environment.

I often hear AI researchers say that AI behaviours can only be explained in limited cases, not in general.

I’d be surprised if there is anything that it’s like to be a smartphone, or even an AI running in a smartphone, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.

The hard problem of consciousness, as philosophers of mind use the term, is not to understand how the mind works or how it produces consciousness, but rather to explain how it could possibly produce consciousness--it's a metaphysical problem.

(Physicalists such as Daniel Dennett [and myself] deny that there is such a problem--that dualists like David Chalmers are operating off of erroneous intuitions, not sound arguments.)

> Everything that goes on within it is designed and controlled and can be explained by _a_ human.

Emphasis on _a_ human.

I've heard that there's so many layers of abstraction and obfuscation, that there is no one person who can explain thoroughly every layer of a modern computer, from the volts in the bits, to the web front end, through the cloud.

Like Jane in the Ender's Game series. Fascinating stuff.

The internet isn’t exactly new in this regard. You could just as easily ask things like “what is it like to be European society?”

"We are, however, able to see that, excepting the simplest of life forms, an animal has a consciousness"

What does the word "consciousness" mean in that sentence, and why are the simplest of life forms excluded? What test do we apply that all organisms pass, except for the simplest life forms, which fail?

Gut feelings, obviously.

I enjoy being a battery: https://www.theonion.com/i-enjoy-being-a-battery-1819583258

Fun read.

Only tangentially related... the podcast "Everything is Alive" is really enjoyable. The host interviews a variety of everyday objects: a can of soda, a magic eight ball, a towel, a song, etc.

The first episode, "Louis, Can of Cola", is my favorite.

"Our pets are amusing" - Dust SF. Two intelligent Alexa-like devices maneuver their "owners" into hooking up.

This reminds me of the question: did we domesticate wheat, or did wheat domesticate us? Did we domesticate cats, or did cats domesticate us?

Thus is the nature of the feedback loop.

I studied dogs quite a bit (informal academia (course audits, etc)), and I firmly believe they domesticated us instead of the other way around.

Please tell us more

I think the relationship is more of a symbiotic one, like wheat.

On the other hand, we get to pick the meaning of "domestication", and I believe the definition leans heavily on the traits a domesticated dog exhibits, so there is not much to discuss here.

Eh, the guy studied dogs. I'm sure he has something to say

Do smartphones "die" when they run out of battery or is that merely "sleep" for them? RAM needs power, but ROM is preserved so ... amnesia? Comma?

I'm never letting my phone battery drain again.

Do Android phones dream of electric sleep?

I'd say they die.

There's not really a better analog in biology. Even in the case of sexual reproduction, the new life carries tons of epigenetic state across the creation boundary, and is more akin to fork(2) than exec(2).

A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me.

>A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me.

but some state is preserved in non-volatile memory.

And when you die, your DNA can still be sequenced.

DNA is generally non-mutable, so that's more akin to the (read-only) /system partition on androids. There's still the /data partition which is mutable and gets saved even after you power down.

In that conceptual framework it seems life doesn't have non volatile storage at all, so it seems a bit of a non sequitur to use it in an analogy with computing systems.

The closest I can come up with using that framework is plasmids. But if you squirreled away the plasmids of a plasma before ceasing all of it's operations, then injected those plasmids into a new copy of the bacterium, you'd still say that the original bacterium died.

>In that conceptual framework it seems life doesn't have non volatile storage at all

how so?

Do you have a counter example?

If piercings or tattoos occurred in nature, would they count as non-volatile memory?

Amnesia of everything but carefully written. Rebirth.

What you're illustrating here is that "awake", "asleep", "death", and "life", are pretty terrible metaphors for states our computers exist in.

Saying my laptop is "asleep" when it's suspended is verbally cromulent, no one would be confused by what I meant. But the metaphor breaks down badly on any attempt to extend it.

Even if I brick it, I have the option to purchase fresh equipment and restore from the most recent backup. If my timing is good, there may be no difference from my perspective.

This isn't possible with living things, and it might not even be possible, the fond dreams of mind-upload enthusiasts notwithstanding.

Perhaps we should say 'reborn' instead of rebooted, 'reincarnated' instead of 'reinstalled'.

It is a clone. The original one is dead. Works for teleportation too.

and time travel. O'Brien must suffer.

https://youtu.be/k0_LQtPQUu8

Because we built the phone, we know what is the "state" of the phone and any information in volatile storage can be persisted in non-volatile storage.

I can't think of any biological analogy for that. If/when there is a mechanism to save and restore the state of a human mind, we will have to add more nuance to how we talk about dying.

Dying is irreversible cessation of function. Turning off a machine that can be restarted is more like suspended animation.

Ted Chiang's SF story collection "Exhalation" has a wonderful story on digital life forms ("digients"): The Lifecycle of Software Objects.

It raises many questions, among them the ethics of putting such beings to sleep, or restoring them from a previous checkpoint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...

Full text of the novella:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130306030242/http://subterrane...

I think there's a few questions that need answering first. At least one of them is whether or not a non-stochastic system can be conscious.

To summarize the cutting edge state of understanding of consciousness,: "We don't know".

I'm not saying this isn't a fun little question to think about, but from the perspective of advancing knowledge, it's premature, and assumes an answer to a whole lot of questions.

Am I correct in thinking that you presume humans to be stochastic systems?

The question "does X have subjective experiences" could be addressed by a theory of consciousness. Such theory should be able to tell what physical systems, and to what extent, are conscious. Interestingly, attempts of such theory already exist: Integrated information theory is a good example.

Also Panpsychism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

The problem with these definitions is that they require wide-spread agreement to be considered valid explanations.

IIT is really just a definition. And like all such definitions, it includes some things that are intuitively not conscious and excludes some things that are intuitively conscious, which is why such "theories" don't go anywhere.

Wayback Machine Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200928213413/http://www.rought...

You'll spend every waking hour of your life being poked, thrown around, yelled at, dropped and sometimes drowned. If that doesn't kill you you'll spend the rest of eternity in a drawer. So hell maybe?

For the opposite take, I remember a short story with aliens that were intelligent, but not self aware. They instinctively attacked the humans because they interpreted entertainment broadcasts as a malicious attack.

Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Yep, great book. All of his work in fact is great. Checkout Echophraxia if you liked Blind sight.

They are all great but often seriously uncomfortable reading.

I've got them both in hardcover as Firefall. :)

I must confess I couldn't make it through the third Rifters book with all the torture. :S But yeah, overall his stuff is great. If it's uncomfortable, that's because it's all too plausible.

Thing's will probably snowball exponentially once we figure out how to clone consciousness and create fractal networks.

>The Day I got Reincarnated as a Smartphone

The Anime

"We know it feels like something to be that animal"

Daniel Dennett and others have shown that this is not generally true. Nagel's arguments have been repeatedly refuted, so they are not a good foundation for an argument.

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