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The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious. Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's

by umvi 7y ago

The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious. Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine? The atoms in one pocket of the sun's chaotic fusion reaction might randomly and momentarily behave like an intelligent quantum computer - does that mean the sun is momentarily conscious from time to time?

MrLeap 7y ago
Your comment got me thinking so I'm going to ramble a bit. The sun being conscious makes sense to me. Not as we are, but then again nothing is as we are. Cats communicate with each other, cleverly explore and learn about their environment but they aren't conscience like us. Growing up, my vocabulary advanced waaay faster than my experience. I learned what the word "nostalgia" was well before I first felt nostalgic. In fact, I remember feeling it a few times about summers with friends that had moved before connecting the feeling with the word. It was a slap on forehead moment. I concluded that nostalgia was an inbuilt "thing", everyone else probably experienced it in the same way. It's easy for me to consider nostalgia as just an inbuilt reaction to a certain kind of signal. (Something periodic that makes you feel good, then it stops. Recalling the period creates a bittersweet feeling). The space between consciousness and inanimate intuitively feels to me like a gradient. Various levels of brain damage might yield someone unresponsive to speech but responsive to pain. Then there are people who feel no pain, but otherwise are completely normal. Therefore, I'd put on the lower end of the consciousness scale "reacting to changes" the more changes something reacts to, and the more varied their reactions, the more conscious it is. We're talking things between the sun and single celled organisms. Single cells don't seem to do much rumination, but they get hungry. Advanced consciousness seems to require heritable lessons and skills. A feral human that somehow survived alone on an island from birth wouldn't be conscious like the rest of us are, but I bet it would still feel nostalgia if its favorite berry went extinct. I'm comfortable ascribing feelings to things with full knowledge they aren't feeling it like we are. I bet red giant stars feel fat and old.
naasking 7y ago
> The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious. See panpsychism and integrated information theory.
NoodleIncident 7y ago
> Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine? This is just defamiliarization. It's an excessively common belief that a computer with the right inputs, outputs, and software could realize that it is itself a computer program. The same software on a marble machine would be a lot harder to hook up to useful sensors, and would be too large to be at all practical, but it's the same thing.
fipar 7y ago
Since you happened to use marbles as the analogy, I think you may find "I am a strange loop"[1] and the concept of simmballs and the careenium[2] interesting. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop [2]https://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/the-careenium/ https://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/the...
gnode 7y ago
> The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious. The thing would have to have correlates of consciousness; mechanisms which perform the properties which constitute conscious thought. I see no reason why such a mechanism could not be created by such general machinery as a marble run, albeit a very large one. The sun however is a chaotic ball of plasma, so I can't see how it could play home to an arbitrary complex mechanism.

by umvi 7y ago

MrLeap 7y ago

Your comment got me thinking so I'm going to ramble a bit. The sun being conscious makes sense to me. Not as we are, but then again nothing is as we are. Cats communicate with each other, cleverly explore and learn about their environment but they aren't conscience like us. Growing up, my vocabulary advanced waaay faster than my experience. I learned what the word "nostalgia" was well before I first felt nostalgic. In fact, I remember feeling it a few times about summers with friends that had moved before connecting the feeling with the word. It was a slap on forehead moment. I concluded that nostalgia was an inbuilt "thing", everyone else probably experienced it in the same way. It's easy for me to consider nostalgia as just an inbuilt reaction to a certain kind of signal. (Something periodic that makes you feel good, then it stops. Recalling the period creates a bittersweet feeling). The space between consciousness and inanimate intuitively feels to me like a gradient. Various levels of brain damage might yield someone unresponsive to speech but responsive to pain. Then there are people who feel no pain, but otherwise are completely normal. Therefore, I'd put on the lower end of the consciousness scale "reacting to changes" the more changes something reacts to, and the more varied their reactions, the more conscious it is. We're talking things between the sun and single celled organisms. Single cells don't seem to do much rumination, but they get hungry. Advanced consciousness seems to require heritable lessons and skills. A feral human that somehow survived alone on an island from birth wouldn't be conscious like the rest of us are, but I bet it would still feel nostalgia if its favorite berry went extinct. I'm comfortable ascribing feelings to things with full knowledge they aren't feeling it like we are. I bet red giant stars feel fat and old.

naasking 7y ago

> The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious. See panpsychism and integrated information theory.

NoodleIncident 7y ago

> Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine? This is just defamiliarization. It's an excessively common belief that a computer with the right inputs, outputs, and software could realize that it is itself a computer program. The same software on a marble machine would be a lot harder to hook up to useful sensors, and would be too large to be at all practical, but it's the same thing.

fipar 7y ago

Since you happened to use marbles as the analogy, I think you may find "I am a strange loop"[1] and the concept of simmballs and the careenium[2] interesting. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop [2]https://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/the-careenium/ https://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/the...

gnode 7y ago

> The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious. The thing would have to have correlates of consciousness; mechanisms which perform the properties which constitute conscious thought. I see no reason why such a mechanism could not be created by such general machinery as a marble run, albeit a very large one. The sun however is a chaotic ball of plasma, so I can't see how it could play home to an arbitrary complex mechanism.