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Comment by ASalazarMX | Hacker News Reader

> hundreds of thousands of live human brain cells

A human brain has like six orders of magnitude more cells than that chip. A single ant has 250,000 neurons. A crow brain has 1,500,000,000. I don't think we have to worry yet.

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But how would you know? With a patient who has locked-in syndrome they can sense and think but have no ability to move or communicate. How could you tell if your fish brain (or future AI model) has the capacity to think or suffer?

To answer the rhetorical: We don't know (and possibly can't know).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

You’re worried about a “brain” that has orders of magnitude fewer neurons than an ant but in the meanwhile we birth, enslave, sexually abuse, torture and kill over 80 billion land animals that definitely have conscience, sentience and a capacity to suffer.

I do appreciate the concern. It’s very valid but unfortunately pales relative to awful atrocities we humans are enacting everyday in the billions.

Emphasis in "yet"

someone doesn't remember y2k.

Imagine that every individual cell is conscious, and that consciousness is a binary quality.

Imagine that it isn't. What use is imagining something without the slightest shred of evidence?

Panpsychism in various forms has historically held sway with many philosophers. It’s really the Occam’s razor for consciousness.

Ok. So the brain cell is individually conscious. Won't be conscious of much, it has no sense organs. Just lost in its own thoughts?

That's pretty much how it felt when I experienced an ego death on mushrooms. My sense of self shattered and I could feel that I was emerging from a deep resonance in the consciousness of my cells.

Perhaps nerve endings within "sense organs" offer a level of abstraction in propagating information to a consciousness somewhere else.

Consider happiness. Possibly a cell feels happy when there's plenty of energy and its cellular processes are working well. Possibly it feels something else leading up to apoptosis.

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