Ah, I love slime moulds (I thought "mold" was American spelling, but apparently even Scientific American spells it "mould") - thank you for the article. It's fu

Ah, I love slime moulds (I thought "mold" was American spelling, but apparently even Scientific American spells it "mould") - thank you for the article. It's funny to think of moulds making irrational decisions. > slime moulds make decisions through comparison to the other available options, rather than having an intrinsic value for things That sense of subjectivity and "thought" process to make decisions, sure sounds like consciousness to me - but then again, a stream flowing down a mountain also "makes decisions", and I'm not sure if there's a quantifiable difference. I just read the article you linked elsewhere: How 300 Matchboxes Learned to Play Tic-Tac-Toe [0]. When we call a completely mechanical process "learning", it seems to imply some kind of subjectivity and "thinking". It's hard for me to pinpoint, what is the difference between a human and a machine learning? The difference seems merely the level of complexity. Discussion about consciousness usually breaks down, I think, because the root of this concept is in our belief systems and philosophical view of life. At one end of the spectrum, all of existence is "conscious" in varying degrees; at the other end, nothing is really "conscious", it can all be explained as mechanical processes. The latter used to be a "heretical" worldview, to deny the "spirit" pervading all creation. These days, I'd say the former view is the odd one out, being unscientific (without experimental evidence) and based on an iffy definition of consciousness. https://opendatascience.com/menace-donald-michie-tic-tac-toe-machine-learning/ https://opendatascience.com/menace-donald-michie-tic-tac-toe... --- Edit: Here's a quote I just came across: > Freeman Dyson argued that "mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron." ..And a comment elsewhere mentioned, "consciousness as an emergent property of physical systems". That seems to be getting closer to a reasonable definition/explanation.