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Comment by asymptosis | Hacker News Reader

The author has perhaps overlooked CAP theorem. Consciousness requires both consistency and high-availability, thus it can't arise in situations of partitioned networks.

Brains (or, at least, most healthy brains) are unpartitioned. But any given community of brains is at best intermittently connected: I wave to my neighbour, then my neighbour disappears from sight. I call my parents on the phone, then the phonecall terminates. I have a tab open to a webpage, but then my attention shifts to another tab.

Perhaps consciousness could eventually arise from individual machines or the internet more broadly, but I can't see an argument for it happening in something as loose as "the United States".

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We don't actually know how much the neurons in a given brain pay attention to each other. The part of me that learnt to ride a bicycle probably just sits there idle while I type this comment here. Logically, they might as well have been partitioned. Your example of switching between tasks is another great example of how parts of our brain don't really need high-availability.

In fact, many psychological studies from the last century contest this idea of consciousness requiring either consistency or high-availability.

Even when you switch tasks you still use most of your brain. You never really turn off any part of your brain, they're pretty much all always active, just at different levels.

This seems consistent with high-availability.

Switching off is not the only way for something to be unavailable, at least in the context of the CAP theorem. When a web server is unavailable, it is often because of connectivity problems rather than the server being switched off.

In the original example, the neighbors and parents don't turn off either when they are out of sight. They are still part of the collective society, just harder for a specific person to reach.

> Consciousness requires both consistency and high-availability, thus it can't arise in situations of partitioned networks.

[Citation needed]

You'll figure it out eventually.

You can do better than that.

Everyone can do better.

Where do you get the idea that consistency is necessary? I certainly think it’s not.

I'm not talking about consciousness adhering to logical consistency (I think it actually requires completeness). I'm talking about all parts of a given mind needing to agree on what the current focus of attention is. Failure to have such agreement is a hallmark of dreaming, psychosis, or just having two separate brains.

How do you explain split-brain phenomena if consistency is not required? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

In that article, split-brain looks to be an extreme state of inconsistency, that is somehow still OK. In fact, from the examples there I would deduce, that we are mostly inconsistent.

> He also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shaken her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand. However, such conflicts are very rare. If a conflict arises, one hemisphere usually overrides the other.

It sounds like this person still refers to himself as a single mind. It is not uncommon for people without split brain to begin an action, that is quickly interrupted by opposite decision. I bet you this opposite decision does not always come from the same set of neurons.

I think all of us have these kinds of inconsistencies way, way more than most people imagine. It's just you don't necessarily perceive them. We might be eventually consistent, though, which still sacrifices the C in CAP.

Split-brain is just a more severe, permanent and larger-scale inconsistency. The difference between, say a database inconsistency or brief partitioning versus two subnets becoming physically disjoint.

I don't know about you, but my consciousness availability is a lot closer to nine fives than it is five nines.

There are times when my brain is neither consistent nor available for certain data. I conclude that these are not requirements for consciousness.

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