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Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

I can accept (and to be honest even like) the idea, that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex structures in an animal brain, that there is no soul, no other planes of reality, no special quantum phenomena needed, etc.

Maybe we could create a synthetic artificial conscious mind. At worst we could simulate a full human brain at whatever level is necessary. I can accept that.

What's crazy to me is the following: It's not the computer that's conscious. Instead, the computation itself is conscious. And the computation is obviously matter-independent. As a thought experiment it would be possible to compute it on paper and those pen and paper calculations would be conscious. Or pebbles in a desert XKCD style.

https://xkcd.com/505/

Like… what?

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I think that probably is the logical conclusion. There are a fair number of sci-fi books along those lines, e.g. Permutation City.

The way I think about it is that no neuron is conscious; it is the network that is conscious. That is why the "mystery" of Searle's Room doesn't seem mysterious at all. Of course the human following the directions in the room doing thinking in Chinese doesn't understand the language any better than ATP (which is what the human is in that thought experiment -- an energy source) knows English in my brain.

One thought experiment I always find myself having is that if this is the case, does it make any difference if the network is physically larger? Not necessarily more complex, just the distances signals have to travel is bigger, say planet sized instead of brain sized. Would this system be conscious but just with a slower tick rate? Faster time perception?

IIRC It’s Steve Grand’s contention in Creation: Life And How To Make It that we will only get artificial consciousness with artificial biological drives.

Couldn't you say the same about us? It's not the brain (hardware) that is conscious, but the mind (software) running on it.

How could you be deciding what's for dinner, if the decision takes so long that all the food has rotted, your body has died, and the continent is now in an ice age? How could you be learning something about your observations of the night sky, if the suns had burned out before you knew they were there at all? Our 'conscious awareness' is the awareness of the environment around us in a timeframe where it stays approximately the same; when something changes too quickly, an explosion, a car crash, we have to wait until the environment steadies before we can think about it. If an insect zips by too quick to see, we never become conscious of it. We can be conscious of sound but not radio waves. Is it possible to have a consciousness where everything zips by too quickly for it to notice, where it has no senses to learn about what's around it, it's not-conscious of anything?

At that point, the XKCD person moving the stones on the beach is doing a bit of a Searle's Chinese Room; "look, these stones I'm setting into positions I chose to represent some knowledge I chose, which I'm moving in patterns I chose, are echoing my choices back to me in ways I chose to interpret!".

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