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Comment by towaway15463 | Hacker News Reader

I think pan-psycism was onto something. Not that atoms have consciousness but I think almost anything that is made up of complex cells or even a single cell has some form of consciousness and we are simply a very scaled version of that. Michael Levin has called attention to the remarkably complex and recognizable behaviour of single celled organisms, I think he’s right that there is a lot more processing going on inside a cell using all of that molecular machinery, much more than we ever dreamed possible.

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> we are simply a very scaled version of that

I might be extrapolating too far here, but if that is the case, couldn't we argue that this is also the case further up the scale?

Is the earth, with all its mountains, weather systems and inhabitants, conscious?

Is the solar system? The galaxy? The universe?

What does consciousness even _mean_ at that scale?

It does strike me as "arbitrary" that consciousness should only exist at our scale. Maybe our version of consciousness does, but is there some other type of consciousness at different scales?

I wouldn't think it would extend beyond the boundaries of a single biological entity. As far as we know, cells need to be in very close communication with each other in order to produce what we call consciousness. They do this by releasing chemical signals into their surrounding environment that then modify surface structures of other cells which then triggers some process within those other cells. It's not clear that consciousness could be shared via other means. I'm open to being proven wrong by ventures like Neuralink though.

Right now, neurons in your head are firing and generating thoughts and concepts in response to light hitting your eyes in patterns that were created to represent thoughts in my head - there is a chain of direct physical phenomena that stretch from my brain to your brain that are affecting thoughts in your head right now. In person, it's even more direct - neuronal firing patterns in my brain cause jostling air molecules which incite neuronal firing patterns in your head. In a very real and direct way, my neuronal firing patterns influence your neuronal firing patterns.

What's amazing is that this extends out through time and distance - my neuronal firing patterns are shaped and affected by the neuronal firing patterns of beings long dead through both the same direct mechanisms described above and more indirect mechanisms mediated through other beings over time - in fact, by the time you've read this far, I'll have indelibly impacted your neuronal firing patterns. You'll never think again in a way that's not influenced by my thinking.

I would, here are two arguments...

You and I are sharing a thought. This thought I am writing at you, implanting in your brain via words you understand... is fundamentally the same as the messages between cells in your body... a message is a message is a message, regardless of the methodology of the message.

Just being intelligent, and just being able to pass messages back and forth is all that's needed for a consciousness to be made up from the parts - it may be hampered by latency. But the default is that this process scales indefinitely.

If that's not convincing - here's an example of how this plays out in our day to day lives at a smaller scale than the whole species... you're work... you work in a group... that group has goals and desires the members of that group reach a consensus towards... precisely like the cells in your brain, taking various inputs from stimuli - reach a consensus to form your conscious experience...

even when we are separated by physical distance - we create connections to each other to mitigate that distance. planetary distances are small enough that connections might be fast enough...

I would default to {maybe: (bet on yes) }.

Yes, you can certainly make this argument. As you start going up the scale, theories about this become more and more indistinguishable from religion and/or magic.

What is God if not some consciousness so large you cannot perceive it?

This alludes to an existential worry I have about machine intelligence. I worry that we might emulate the human brain approximately, to where it manages average human-level tasks but fails to accurately mimic the brain's full complexity. It'd be like a Nintendo emulator that isn't cycle-accurate; passable, even good most of the time, but inferior to the real thing in many small subtle ways. It's not clear to me how to test for such a condition. IQ tests maybe? College-level exams? Poetry contest? If a limited AI were to succeed humanity as the dominant life form on Earth, or as the being we send out to explore the stars, and if its flaws ultimately made it just too dumb to self-improve, that first biological spark would be lost for good.

I'll take the other side of this and suggest that we're likely to build machines with a much greater depth of consciousness than ourselves. If consciousness is simply what occurs when you combine senses with the ability to reason and a concept of self, then we should be able to create machines with a far richer and deeper consciousness than anything we can even imagine.

Our conscious experience of the world is limited by our 5 senses, but a machine wouldn't have that limitation. Their conscious experience of the world could be expanded to include radio waves or super-human hearing, for example. They could also have a far greater reasoning capability which would perhaps enable them to appreciate their senses as a conscious observer in a deeper way than we could ever imagine.

Personally I think this is more likely to be the outcome of super-human intelligence. We like to think our of consciousness as special, but in the space of all consciousnesses I suspect we're on the lower end of the spectrum given our sensory and intellectual limitations.

But what does "greater depth of consciousness" really mean? What are the metrics one uses to compare counciousnesses? I think we're trying to discuss things we don't even have the language for. Whether or not we can replicate it is just guesswork at this point. Compared to nature our computers aren't very powerful-- we can't even stimulate all the computations going on in a single cell in real life. It's sort of like alchemists thinking gold will spring up when they mix their random concoctions together, because they didn't know how nuclear physics works.

>But what does "greater depth of consciousness" really mean? What are the metrics one uses to compare counciousnesses?

Completely agreed. The meta-question I’m asking is, how will we tell if we’ve built the right metrics? The answer used to be “if it passes the Turing Test,” but we’re rapidly superseding that answer and its replacements.

Maybe the answer will become obvious as our knowledge of the brain advances. Or, maybe we’ll be satisfied with a simplified model of consciousness that mostly works but is wrong in subtle yet critical ways, like Newtonian physics without theories of relativity. I suppose we’ll just have to keep asking questions, and aggressively pushing the limits of what machine intelligence can achieve relative to humans.

> If consciousness is simply what occurs when you combine senses with the ability to reason and a concept of self

It's possible that you are missing some number between 1 and 10^12 components of consciousness. You can experience for yourself that your own consciousness is not simply composed of your senses, self, and reason through meditation. The initial realization is that the majority of your thoughts are not produced by any of those faculties and seem to arise on their own. So right there you have something not in your list which is pushing fully formed thoughts into your awareness. Pay close attention to your internal state and you soon find that thoughts, sensations, and emotions are happening concurrently and often compete with each other for attention. So this seems to indicate that there are a multitude of processes driving these. Thoughts can even compete with each other for attention so there is seemingly not a single origin for them. Finally, beyond all of that there is definitely something else that I can only describe as a sense of being or what it feels like to simply exist that undergirds all of that mental activity. It's the thing that remains when you take away or look past the other activity and it's always there since with practice you can switch to attending to that sensation at any point. I often wonder if that feeling is what it feels like to be a much simpler organism.

I think that survival instincts are symptomes of consciousness. I feel its almost by definition.

Which poses interesting questions, is it a form of molecular chemistry chained reaction? Or is additional physics / maths required? Or something else of course, not discounting anything.

Yeah, but the scaling functions for intelligence are exceptionally non-linear.

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