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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this. There are so many philosophical debates out there regarding what happens after we die, if animals are "conscious", if computers or AI could have "consciousness", but in my opinion it's all a big illusion created out of our own egos as a rationalization for our existence.

We are biological machines. Sure, we have an awareness of ourselves, but so do computers in some contexts; for example you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself. It's already been proven that animals have an awareness of themselves when looking in a mirror, such as Dolphins, Chimpanzees, etc. Humans may be a bit further along in our cognitive development but there is no obvious point where you can say "Humans are conscious" because we're all somewhere on a sliding scale of intelligence and self-awareness.

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> you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself.

Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an awareness of itself.

You say that as an outsider able to view both code and its representation. The code itself only 'sees' its representation as itself.

Isn't that precisely what it means? You are aware of something, thus you can take it and its aspects into consideration in your calculations. You have a representation of yourself - same thing. Of course your representation may not be completely accurate, but what perception would be.

> Isn't that precisely what it means?

Maybe or maybe not. This is the nub of the debate. I would argue that answering "yes" to this is a partial endorsement of pan-psychism. If the ability to experience qualia is property of certain algorithms or types of information flow then it's a fundemental property of the universe.

Thought experiments about p-zombies and mind simulation are an interesting litmus test to separate different points of view on this.

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(sorry) This would mean, at a minimum, that every biological entity down to single cell organisms are conscious. They could be, I don't know.

I don't think so. The concept of self is distinct from an image (or other representation). If I run pylint against the pylint source code, it has a representation of itself. It's not aware that those lines of code are in any way special to it. I don't think it mystically becomes self-aware because of that situation.

In your lingo, something can know what it looks like without taking its aspects into consideration.

I think the inverse is true, though: something that cannot perceive a representation of itself cannot be self-aware.

There is actual an obvious point…

Everytime you wake up in the morning.

Some work detecting it as well for medical reasons https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.3006294

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