(What about a picture of the waveform of a verbal description? ...a complete scifi brain scan of someone who understands what it is?)
Information given in the SCP tell us that digitally stored files are affected to. That seems to mean digitally stored text.
Text in a digital form is just a way to indirectly reference pictures to be shown on the screen or printed. Sometimes it's a straight lookup table correspondence (ASCII), sometimes more complex (Unicode); there may be noise (OOXML). I'd guess that, in context of this SCP, a PNG with letters on it would count as text too.
This suggests that the issue isn't with a representation format, but the interpretation of it - or at least in a way the representation is processed by human minds.
I put forward a hypothesis that the relevant recognition criteria is words being recognized from sensory inputs by the human brain, and backtracking to most direct source of these words. This would explain the results of both documented tests. I propose following further tests to be made:
- Repeating Test 1, but blindfolding the test subject before telling them to write words down, so that they can't see them. Expected outcome: like in Test 2.
- Repeating Test 2, but instructing the test subject to not repeat the words heard out loud. Expected outcome: like in Test 2.
- Repeating Test 2 with the test subject incapable of hearing. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
- Repeating Test 2, using a machine recording sounds and replaying them after a delay, in place of the test subject. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
- Repeating Test 1, using a computer connected to a microphone and a printer, in place of test subject; the machine would run a dictation algorithm to print the spoken words. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
In test 1, the subject was commanded to translate the pictograms into text.
In test 2 the subject was commanded to describe the pictograms verbally.
"We can ask: if consciousness is reducible to computation, then what kinds of computation suffice to bring about consciousness? What if each person on earth simulated one neuron in your brain, communicating by passing little slips of paper around? Does it matter if they do it really fast?
Or what if we built a gigantic lookup table that hard-coded your responses in every possible interaction of at most, say, 5 minutes? Would that bring about your consciousness? Does it matter that such a lookup table couldn’t fit in the observable universe? Would it matter if anyone actually consulted the table, or could it just sit there, silently effecting your consciousness? For what matter, what difference does it make if the lookup table physically exists—why isn’t its abstract mathematical existence enough?"
I do think this kind of group consciousness or meta consciousness exists, on many layers even. That's how society works.
Do you draw your shell around your children?
What about your group identity such as your neighborhood, town, sports team, or country.
Can you draw this shell around abstract ideas that you consider core to your being?
Where you draw that shell might change your level of empathy for other people.
* Is my immune system conscious?
* Is my family conscious?
* Is my community conscious?
* Is my country conscious?
* Is the universe conscious?
What's all this RNA doing in here? Why am I making so many of these stupid spiky things? Dammit, now I've got to clean up this mess.
3 weeks later: What the fuck, not this shit again.
Consciousness is not a well defined concept. Any line you draw between conscious and non-conscious is arbitrary. So where do you want to draw the line?
We're just bigger ants, is all.
If the flow of time was compared to a new deck of playing cards, would it matter if they were shuffled? Given any individual card, the previous and next cards can be determined.
Heck, every event in the universe is there in Pi, in order too.
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
I have a weird theory connected to the "one electron universe" that at the moment right before the big bang there was 1 particle. Because of relativity it's position and velocity must have been exactly 0, but this violates uncertainty, so the particle instantly becomes infinitely uncertain.
Everything that happens in the universe is just part of the process of the waveform of that event collapsing.
.But then it would stole every random bit because any information can be theoretically decoded as random bits!
Okay, then, we put a random text on a paper and observe if that thing steals the paper. If not, that is truly a random number that cannot be decoded in any meaningful way.
Which means we found the Chaitin's constant which could be used for solving any problem. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant
See, Sci-fi is stupid.