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Comment by bencollier49 | Hacker News Reader

That depends what you mean by "consciousness". If you mean the "experience of awareness", then we can't even properly define it, let alone begin to explain it.

This whole question is so hard because we find it impossible to define the terms. It could be that by default, we cannot define consciousness. Perhaps that implies that the universe is made of consciousness, rather than the other way around.

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You are right we should properly define our terms. And of course as you pointed out it is very hard. Maybe if we defined them in a sort of reverse order it would be easier.

Consider humans as biological automatons. Our brains are some sort of neural networked computer and the architecture of the neurons makes for, from a programmers point of view, some very advanced sort of "artificial" intelligence. From here there seems to be two possibilities: 1) That is it. Nothing else and their is no "being" experiencing what the brain processes or 2) something else, I think this idea is what we call...

Consciousness would be the idea that their is some sort of unifying sort of connectedness that allows the soul, ghost, being, etc to experience what is happening and in some people's viewpoints have an affect on what is happening (freewill in other words).

To me this definition seems terribly biased towards my point of view but I don't really know of any other way to define this.

I can't define consciousness, but what has always helped me understand consciousness is: Say you have a camera connected to a computer, which is connected to a display. Some processing happens, which gets displayed by the screen.

We humans are similar, we have our eyes (camera), this sensory data goes to our brain (cpu) and then it goes to our display (... consciousness?).

That's how I see it anyway

Yes, but who's watching the screen?

Good point, I'm just thinking out loud in this post.

Either All sensory endpoints and the viewer are one, the viewer IS the cumulative sensory endpoint, we'll name this consciousness.

OR the viewer is a separate "something", the viewer is separate from the sensory endpoint. And we'll name the sensory endpoint "consciousness" and the viewer the "soul".

Any other ideas?

For me consciousness is "the ability to analyze and influence your own thoughts".

This might not correspond 100% to what philosophers mean, but it has the immense advantage of making consciousness a well defined concept, and even measurable.

I am almost certainly wrong about this, given it is mostly idle supposition, however I think of it in terms of awareness and reflective awareness and that the ratio of reflective awareness to simple awareness in a network of neurons is very roughly to do with how much of the network is folded back on itself compared to how much reaches out to the sensory inputs.

So from this perspective, reflective awareness is what you define as consciousness, and it can be present to massively varying degrees, alongside direct awareness down to the neuron.

So, are JITs conscious?

Well, assuming you run the JIT on its own code it could be considered conscious to a tiny degree. It can analyze it's code, but only at a very low level, with no understanding of how it works. Also it can change its own code, but only to improve speed, not to change its functionality.

But, you are right that it is possible to write quite simple self modifying programs that would be conscious with this definition. However, having consciousness without intelligence can't be very useful.

I like Douglas Hofstadter's take on it - consciousness is a loop, when an entity thinks about thinking about thinking. His book I am a strange loop is a very entertaining read :-)

Interesting. But if the universe is all consciousness, then one can ask what it is conscious about, and why this consciousness is forced to follow the laws of physics.

On the other hand, I find it surprising that science does not deal with "experience of awareness", for clearly it is part of reality (since we are talking about it) and hence of physics (there is only one way out of this, which is to say that we are all zombies just making up that our awareness is influencing reality).

By the way, anyone know of a more concise term for "experience of awareness"? I have been looking for it, and I'm sure it must exist, but no luck so far. How do philosophers address this concept?

One possible concept could be meta-attention. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221309.1982.971...

You could be looking for "Qualia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Could qualia be the concept you're looking for? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)

Or we have a soul, separated from but interacting with the body. :)

This dualistic approach cannot definitively be ruled out, but it does raise serious problems as to how these categorically different substances can have any affect on each other.

Another approach is to consider consciousness and material to be 'dual aspects' of the same intractable underlying reality. This was the approach taken by Spinoza and later by Schopenhauer, but also, independently and millennia earlier, by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.

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