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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this argument is that everything is conscious at that point. The consciousness may operate at geological or faster than human time scales but who is to say that we operate very quickly or slowly to begin with? Your computer is already conscious before you even loaded software into it, before you added your fancy machine learning AI. The software merely gives the conscious processor its ability to express consciousness in a way that humans can understand.

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The only "problem" with that argument is largely that it assumes that human consciousness is somehow different from all other possible forms of consciousness, and that's not at all a given.

What if the universe itself is conscious? We'd have absolutely no way to measure that from our limited perspective.

Insofar as this premise (it is not really an argument) says any sufficiently powerful cognitive system is conscious, it is not saying that everything (or even most things) are.

A more pertinent objection is that the phrase I quoted above is just a placeholder for anything resembling an explanation.

> The problem with this argument is that everything is conscious at that point

This is like saying that the Earth and other planets have gravity, and then somebody else saying, well the problem with this argument is that everything has gravity at that point.

Is that a problem? Panpsychists don't seem to think so. Why must human beings believe that, in all the universe, they are a particularly special arrangement of energy?

Panpsychism is also, at this point, just a placeholder for anything resembling an explanation, and it is not necessary for dispelling the notion that humans are unique (in fact, it is quite plausible that other (now extinct) hominids also had self-aware, theory-of-mind-holding, language-using consciousness.)

As to whether there is something special about it, I personally feel that the difficulty of explaining it is enough to regard it as such.

> Your computer is already conscious before you even loaded software into it

I don’t think that follows logically, it would be analogous to a (brain)dead person - who is not conscious. The software is what makes the difference here.

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