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Comment by justinpombrio | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you're missing anything. Tononi made a formula related to how complicated a system is, and claimed that its measures consciousness. And what are you supposed to say to that, when no one can agree on what the word "consciousness" means, but people are still so attached to the word?

For Scott Aaronson's take on "Integrated Information Theory": https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

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Being able to model consciousness mathematically opens up some grotesque possibilities.

Human suffering presumably has some sort of limit based purely on our physical makeup. Suppose though the very concept of subjective suffering could be modeled in some way. Is there any law in the universe that says there is a limit to suffering, pain (or pleasure)?

Could an investigator of the future test out an algorithm on a conscious entity modeled in software, just to see what the mathematical limit of pain is? Maybe that's what Hell is...

It's interesting that our minds automatically turn to the worst possibility, even though this also implies that we could find out what the mathematical limit of joy is. Chances are, there would be a lot more processes simulating joy than pain.

Why would there be more of those if it's "just" a simulation after all?

I would suspect that the pleasant simulations are where research money gets poured into, to figure out how to replicate the feeling of joy in regular humans

Has been explored in Altered Carbon ( the book ). Digitised conscience loaded into computer simulation and torture for practically infinite amount of time

As well as in Black Mirror

I imagine an unfortunate and unwilling architect of a genocide thinking softly, "Lucky for me suffering is limited by the exclusion axiom. Suffering can never exceed the Whole."

Excellent reference. I see that Aaronson is pointing to articles more than ten years old, so the lack of progress goes on longer than the five years I mentioned.

... and I agree completely with your point about consciousness lacking a definition.

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