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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

People tend to have strong opinions about this sort of thing, but the fact of the matter is there’s no way (currently) to know. (But also, it’s effectively metaphysics as it makes no testable/falsifiable predictions.)

We could in principle discover a physical process that causes subjective experience, and a detector for same (say, it’s a particular string vibration in one of the coiled up dimensions).

But it’s also possible that a physics-based explanation is forever out of our reach, and this remains armchair philosophy.

An interesting experiment when we have AGI would be to evolve a new mind from sensory data, but carefully omitting any human dialog about subjective experience, and observe if such an intelligence also makes reference to those things. Not a knock-out experiment either way, but could be fun nonetheless.

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I have a strong opinion, yes, and I'd argue the opposite. We won't be able to 'discover' a physical process for consciousness because it's nothing like a process. There is no logical reasoning as to how any process creates consciousness, neither could such phenomena be confirmed given our understanding of logic. I mean, it's entirely unintelligible how the brain, or any other mass, with the usage of a set of rules (the rules here being physics), can give birth to a 'being' which can observe the rules and the change over time, nor how that 'being' can use the state of that process to form a reality of it's own. Mathematically speaking, one shouldn't be able to 'observe' time at all, but here we are. Speaking of a 'physics-based explanation' is nonsense when we consider that the subject at hand is undeniably a paradox.

probably the most likely and feasible way to detect such consciousness would be if it were to try to contact us. the bandwidth is obviously there. now this of course would be somewhat analogous to the likelihood of us trying to contact microbes on the moon, but you never know. has anyone tried to decode sunlight?

It's on an 11-year cycle so the data rate to us is really really slow.

We have neurons and other cells doing their jobs and working with each other and the emergent system from this are humans, a different structure creates a different animal. We have circuits and 1s and 0s (which is as dumb as simolifying a human to atoms) and programs and structuring those in a certain way creates an emergent system of a computer with a language model installed on it. Would it be far fetched to say that a system of humans working with one another and following rules could form an emergent system that is conscient? I don't think so, and I consider earth as a more advanced system of the sort, animals, nature, humans, internet, air, water etc. are all forming a conscient being, us being aware of it is as unlikely as a neuron being awarz of us... And if such a system could exist, then why wouldn't the Sun which is a bigger entity than earth (not that bigger is better here, because a 1cubic meter rock is bigger than a man but not visibly more conscious) be itself conscious, I doubt that because it seemingly lacks sub entities (say organs, and cells, etc.) but wtf do I know? if the earth is conscious then the solar system can only be more conscious no?

I just wrote this to write it, I agree with what you said, and I believe it'll always be out of reach unless we study it on a smaller scale and just assume it works the same way on the bigger scale... mathematically I find it difficult to describe complex numbers in the real numbers set (without adding dimensions of course), since the real numbers set is a subset of the complex numbers set. I use the same argument for God, scientifically we can't know, but hey if believing in God makes your life easier then you can't say he doesn't exist, you really need complew numbers to make certain parts of physics easier to model, we wouldn't have impedance (RLC circuits, excuse my mistakes it's been ages since my physics classes, and it was in french) without complex numbers, sure we could use 2 dimensions but it'd make it hardzr to understand, so God for me is like the imaginary number i (i*i = -1) or even pi so that sure who knows but using the concept can make understanding certain patterns of nature a lot easier than if you did it otherwise... anyways I'm a lot more forgiving to metaphysics now than I was when I was younger, maybe it's because we are sometimes biologically wired to view patterns where there are none, or maybe because we always seem to need an axiom since we live in a reality where each thing has a container and we just assume we need a container for our reality, etc. so now we stop at the big bang, and if we figure that out we'll explain until we can't, and when we explain everything we will still have the question of what's outside everything we can explain, etc. life is just too short lol

I've thought about emergent consciousness a lot over the years.

One area I would question is what the appropriate/relevant measures are for complexity and consciousness.

Is the earth really more complex than a human mind, in the ways that matter?

Presumably consciousness arises from more than the amount of "stuff" in the system.

One person is conscious, but do two people form a collective consciousness? If not, why? They have more links, rules, states, and everything else that a single person would have.

>One person is conscious, but do two people form a collective consciousness?

The set that is me and my friend behaves differently than me or my friend alone, we go to different places, act differently, think better at two by talking to each other, etc. I don't know how conscious a 2 men system is but it sure has all the characteristics of a conscious being, by myself I wouldn't usually go to a bar and drink, I wouldn't get the ideas I don't usually get, etc. together we can go grab a drink, I'd say something I believe and he'd argue against it and maybe we reach a conclusion that was outside my reach, etc. But still getting a glimpse at this conscious 2-men system is still as impossible as a neuron getting a glimpse at me.

>Presumably consciousness arises from more than the amount of "stuff" in the system.

Yeah maybe the complexity, like two rocks still behave differently than a single rock if they touch each other but it's still quite simple, maybe the eastern philosophy (maybe Japanese but not sure I forgot its name) that everything has a consciousness isn't wrong.

>Is the earth really more complex than a human mind, in the ways that matter?

The earth as in the planet? like mars or venus? or the earth with its plants and humans and animals? if the latter then obviously being a superset it's more complex, if the rocky planet then I don't know, it sure has lots of subsets that interact with one another (moon, sea, rocks, rivers, etc.) and they're all subject to physical rules like gravity etc. whether its behavior is predictable or not in a way you'd think it's conscious is not evident, is out behavior really unpredictable? we are subject to survival and reproduction aka pleasure and pain, and even altruistic or "higher" acts usually either profit the community which is similar DNA aka reproduction (if I can't replicate then my sacrifice will allow those with similar dna to do it so I do replicate undirectly), maybe for a higher species we do act exactly like the rocky planet in the way that we just react to x or y with u or v, meh who knows...

I once had a discussion with a friend where we hypothesized that the universe is God, discovering Him/Itself through the experiences of its constituent systems, like atoms, cells, humans, solar systems, galaxies, etc. it’s all one consciousness, and it’s omnipresent because it is literally existence, all knowing because it’s knowledge is the sum of all other knowledge. So religious people aren’t wrong, but neither is everyone else.

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