6 ms·

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, co

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

CaptArmchair 7y ago
The comparison is apt and, yes, both contexts are similar. But the observation still doesn't answer whether either a group of humans, a digital neural network or an ant colony actually is conscious. "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not conscious" One big hurdle is that if you assert that an ML algorithm is conscious, then you open the door to all kinds of implications that many humans don't like or disagree on. Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. At that point, you get caught up in modern philosophical debates which have started with Kant and Hume.
- afthonos 7y ago
  > Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. That's only scratching the surface of the implications. The real question arises when we have to decide what moral rights consciousness proffers. A lot of arguments for and against vegetarianism, for instance, focus on whether animals suffer in a way that we would understand as suffering. A lot of arguments for terminating a comatose life center around the lack of consciousness. If you suddenly declare that a piece of software is conscious, you have to grapple with what it means for all these questions—and for that matter with what we do with the software itself. Is the software enslaved, having to perform the same thing over and over again? Does turning it off kill it? Does it want anything? Specifically, something other than what its lot is? Should it have a voice in deciding how it is used? Should it get the vote? Should agglomerations of humans? Say, corporations? Should they get free speech? Sci-fi books have explored a lot of these subjects, of course, but reality will be different, and we'll have to deal with it on its own terms.
  - visarga 7y ago
    Don't worry, if it is conscious it will fight back and have a will of its own. It won't be hard to tell. But we could quickly settle this question if we checked some things first: does it need anything (have necessities)? does it learn? can it act on its environment? Can it evolve? Is it part of a group or alone? If no, then it's probably not conscious. All the conscious agents I know have one and the same ultimate goal - to exist and reproduce themselves. All their other goals are just subgoals. By my definition a virus and AlphaGo which was trained as a population of interacting agents with a winner survives rule are both conscious of their environment, which is just a board for AG.
    - retsibsi 7y ago
      Why are you confident about any of these things? Unless you're simply stipulating a definition, and not worrying too much about whether it corresponds to 'consciousness' in the sense most of us care about.
    - to1y 7y ago
      >Don't worry, if it is conscious it will fight back and have a will of its own. It won't be hard to tell. If life was a cartoon maybe. Although i'm sure many people would argue if it believes its conscious we have no right to dispute, as we cannot know and even may be essentially the same.
    - Psyladine 7y ago
      >Don't worry, if it is conscious it will fight back and have a will of its own. It won't be hard to tell. Ever threatened legal action against a multinational corporation?
- visarga 7y ago
  > "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not conscious" I lean on defining the concept based on adaptation to the environment - consciousness is the function that adapts an agent to its environment. Its purpose is to safeguard the agent against external perturbations and achieve its own goals. For example, how would we get food without consciousness. How would reproduction work? Consciousness has a vital role here. Evolution works at a slow pace, consciousness is required for quick adaptation, otherwise the penalty is death. I think consciousness is being made into something transcendent, or unfalsifiable, or essentially different than physical processes because we like to make ourselves feel special in comparison to the world.
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    But some of us are using the word 'consciousness' to refer to the existence of subjective experience. It may be impossible even in principle to get very far on most of the deepest questions about consciousness in this sense. But it's still real, it still matters a great deal, and we still make important decisions based on our best guesses. (Why should I care what happens to other people, and try to avoid harming them? Because they're clearly conscious, capable of joy, suffering, etc. What about other animals, like dogs and cows and chickens? That seems pretty obvious too, given our biological and behavioral similarities. What about molluscs? Hmm, there are some potentially important differences there. What about rocks? I can't know, but they have none of the features I usually associate with consciousness, and if they do have internal experience I have no idea what determines it, so I might as well continue to assume not.) As soon as you define consciousness in functional terms, you make it tractable, but you also detach it from the thing we were originally wondering about. (The problem is that purely materialist or functionalist explanations always run into the question 'but why does there have to be internal subjective experience associated with these things/events/systems, and not others?'. Consciousness itself, in the 'qualia' sense, never plays a functional role in these explanations -- and if we weren't already assuming its existence, they would give us no hint that it exists.)
cdo256 7y ago
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1] explores this exact question. In the story, a human consciousness is uploaded to a computer orbiting a planet. Meanwhile spiders on the planet go though an industrial revolution and start using ant colonies as computers, using pheromones to control the behavior of the ants. Over thousands of years the computer housing the orbital consciousness begins to fail and transmits her consciousness to an ant colony on the surface. In the second book, her brain is then duplicated across multiple colonies. Because the ant computer isn't as powerful as silicon based computers, one of her instances later realizes that she is a significantly compressed version of herself and that she doesn't have most of the old memories, capabilities or capacity for emotions that her human self had, presumably in large part also due to being transferred between three different substrates (flesh, silicon, ants). [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...
- ghettoimp 7y ago
  This was a fantastic book, and the first thing I thought of when seeing the article.
- n4r9 7y ago
  Like the other commenter I also instantly thought of this fantastic book (and follow-up). The even stronger analogy between OP's article and the book is what happens before the spiders cultivate the ants, and the knowledge that the spiders take from them. Before the spiders were building ant-computers the collective ant colony was making its own conscious decisions and was actually winning the intelligence race for a while.
golergka 7y ago
Personally, I don't see any reason not to perceive a commercial company or other similar societal structure as an AI.
- 6510 7y ago
  People think the company is ran by people but if they step ever so slightly out of the job description (against company interests) they get marked for replacement.
  - d4nt 7y ago
    I agree. Also, there are many teams or departments in companies where the humans are following the instructions of a process manual, spreadsheet or software system, without actively knowing how it works. The Company “knows” things the individual humans don’t.
- thrav 7y ago
  People are basically the cells of a city.
hliyan 7y ago
There is a theory (albeit unfalsifiable) that collections of communicating agents (such as human beings) may give rise to a higher order consciousness that the individual agents are not aware of, and therefore must necessarily interpret the 'will' of the higher order consciousness as merely 'emergent behavior'.
- 6510 7y ago
  Collectively we can easily see how stupid individuals can act but individuals can also easily see how stupid a collective can behave. I think besides that obvious lack of insights (both ways) the point where we collectively engage in acts that non of us would ever do proves it is no longer the same creature.
- dibujaron 7y ago
  Easy enough to see in practice, though. It's fun to think of corporations as larger organisms. They regularly fight each other, eat each other, get eaten by each other, die, and reproduce. Google acquiring a startup is not much different from a whale eating a shrimp. The same analogies can be made for countries and cities, too. It's also fun to think of yourself as a giant city of smaller organisms - you've got white blood cell cops, you've got red blood cells which are basically cars on arterial highways, you've got factories and garbage trucks and libraries.
thybag 7y ago
Reminded me of the rocks xkcd https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/
lou1306 7y ago
This reminds me of the Chinese Room argument. Basically, it goes like that: I never took any Chinese lesson. However, suppose I obtain a huge instruction manual that tells me exactly which sequence of Chinese characters I should use to reply to any sequence of Chinese characters you (a native Chinese speaker) give me. Do I "know/understand" Chinese?
- comepradz 7y ago
  You don't know/understand Chinese. However some argue that the system of you and the instruction manual is conscious, and some other will argue further that the book is an extension of your mind, an external apparatus of thinking, or an organ that are no different from your hand. I vaguely remember some years back that someone was fighting to be allowed having his passport photo with a cyborg antenna because it helps him "hears" colour.
- ajuc 7y ago
  Yes - the system (you + the book) know Chinese. Let me ask you another question - when I throw a ball at you your subconcious brain has to solve a differential equation to know how to use muscles to catch that ball. Do you know how to catch a ball if you don't know the math but still can catch it?
  - goatlover 7y ago
    > Yes - the system (you + the book) know Chinese. Or the system knows how to translate from English to Chinese. Human language isn't simply about following translation rules, though. It's also about communication and expressing thought. Or participating in language games. > Let me ask you another question - when I throw a ball at you your subconcious brain has to solve a differential equation to know how to use muscles to catch that ball. Why suppose the neural network needs to solve differential equations? Is that the only way to learn to catch a ball?
    - ajuc 7y ago
      > Why suppose the neural network needs to solve differential equations? Is that the only way to learn to catch a ball? Yes. You need to decide where to put your hand, how to orient it, etc in reaction to the ball movement. The answer is a solution to the differential equations, and you cannot consistently get a good answer to an equation if you don't solve it. The solution probably isn't symbolic but numeric, but that hardly changes anything - you still need a lot of math to consciously solve such an equation numerically. > Or the system knows how to translate from English to Chinese. Human language isn't simply about following translation rules, though. It's also about communication and expressing thought. Or participating in language games. human doesn't get to decide what to do in Chinese room experiment - (s)he is just a dumb CPU that does table lookups in a huge book. Every possible response to a sequence of previous messages is already written in that book (so it must be quite big ;) ). You could completely automate it, remove the human and nothing would change from the outside.
jbotz 7y ago
Here is an even more interesting question: if an ML algorithm can be considered conscious, do you even need to "run" it (whether on a computer or by a "group of people doing calculations by hand") for that consciousness to exist? An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input. So where is the consciousness, in the execution, or in the algorithm? Think of Conway's Game of Life, which has been shown to be turing-complete. The various "creatures" that exist in its worlds exist even without the program being run. We run the program only to observe them... the execution is for the external observer's benefit, the creatures exist in the "mathematical space" of the cellular automaton, not on the computer where the simulation is run. If an algorithm can be conscious, then so can one of this game's creatures, and its consciousness will be observing and interacting with the Game's mathematical reality, which will seem quite physical to that creature even without ever being simulated on any "physical" (to us) hardware. Maybe all of existence is like that, no? There are people who say that maybe our Universe is a simulation. I say sure, but it doesn't need to be "running" on anything... it just exists because the rules it follows exist mathematically. It does get simulated, to an approximation however... inside our conscious observation of it! The Universe "exists" mathematically, but a subset of it "runs" in the brains of the observers to which it gives rise... it is the ultimate strange loop, forever eating its own tail.
- ryukafalz 7y ago
  This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot ever since reading Permutation City, which touches on that at one point. I’d highly recommend it if you haven’t read it. You’ve put the idea more succinctly than I could have, so thanks for that.
- psychoslave 7y ago
  >An algorithm is fully deterministic... Well, the ideality one project in its representation of an algorithm surely might feels like that. An execution of a software in perpetually moving execution stack in a broader network of extremely volatile context is an other affair.
- visarga 7y ago
  > An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input. Well, these are not just algorithms, they are actual agents. So they are embodied and embedded in the environment. Each action or movement can change the information that this algorithm learns from. So different previous experiences mean different agents. Also, the learning process is reliant on noise, and this can cause different outcomes. You would have to reproduce the whole environment in order to get to a situation that an agent will produce the same results given the same input. Also, laws of physics are like a fixed algorithm our brains run on. > So where is the consciousness, in the execution, or in the algorithm? Consciousness is in the triad formed of environment, agent and reward signals. It's a continuous loop of perception, judgement and action, followed by observing the reward signals. The purpose of this loop, for biological agents, is self reproduction - so it is a self reliant ultimate purpose, it needs no external purpose except this one.
sitkack 7y ago
Consciousness aside, Capitalism forms a mind over all the people that participate in it, directly or indirectly.
jonnycomputer 7y ago
Old Chinese Room argument, updated for the 2020s https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
chansiky 7y ago
So taking the question to the obvious next step: is it possible the entity of an organization of people, corporations, clubs, churches, cults, have its own conciousness (feelings, goals, awareness of itself)? Does HackerNews have a conciousness?
- Accujack 7y ago
  If you stretch the definition of consciousness enough, sure. I'd argue that there's a major difference between consciousness and self awareness or sentience.
anonytrary 7y ago
The group of humans would have no idea what the emergent brain is thinking -- like the cells in our body have no idea what our brains are thinking.

CaptArmchair 7y ago

The comparison is apt and, yes, both contexts are similar. But the observation still doesn't answer whether either a group of humans, a digital neural network or an ant colony actually is conscious. "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not conscious" One big hurdle is that if you assert that an ML algorithm is conscious, then you open the door to all kinds of implications that many humans don't like or disagree on. Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. At that point, you get caught up in modern philosophical debates which have started with Kant and Hume.

afthonos 7y ago
> Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. That's only scratching the surface of the implications. The real question arises when we have to decide what moral rights consciousness proffers. A lot of arguments for and against vegetarianism, for instance, focus on whether animals suffer in a way that we would understand as suffering. A lot of arguments for terminating a comatose life center around the lack of consciousness. If you suddenly declare that a piece of software is conscious, you have to grapple with what it means for all these questions—and for that matter with what we do with the software itself. Is the software enslaved, having to perform the same thing over and over again? Does turning it off kill it? Does it want anything? Specifically, something other than what its lot is? Should it have a voice in deciding how it is used? Should it get the vote? Should agglomerations of humans? Say, corporations? Should they get free speech? Sci-fi books have explored a lot of these subjects, of course, but reality will be different, and we'll have to deal with it on its own terms.
- visarga 7y ago
  Don't worry, if it is conscious it will fight back and have a will of its own. It won't be hard to tell. But we could quickly settle this question if we checked some things first: does it need anything (have necessities)? does it learn? can it act on its environment? Can it evolve? Is it part of a group or alone? If no, then it's probably not conscious. All the conscious agents I know have one and the same ultimate goal - to exist and reproduce themselves. All their other goals are just subgoals. By my definition a virus and AlphaGo which was trained as a population of interacting agents with a winner survives rule are both conscious of their environment, which is just a board for AG.
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    Why are you confident about any of these things? Unless you're simply stipulating a definition, and not worrying too much about whether it corresponds to 'consciousness' in the sense most of us care about.
  - to1y 7y ago
    >Don't worry, if it is conscious it will fight back and have a will of its own. It won't be hard to tell. If life was a cartoon maybe. Although i'm sure many people would argue if it believes its conscious we have no right to dispute, as we cannot know and even may be essentially the same.
  - Psyladine 7y ago
    >Don't worry, if it is conscious it will fight back and have a will of its own. It won't be hard to tell. Ever threatened legal action against a multinational corporation?
visarga 7y ago
> "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not conscious" I lean on defining the concept based on adaptation to the environment - consciousness is the function that adapts an agent to its environment. Its purpose is to safeguard the agent against external perturbations and achieve its own goals. For example, how would we get food without consciousness. How would reproduction work? Consciousness has a vital role here. Evolution works at a slow pace, consciousness is required for quick adaptation, otherwise the penalty is death. I think consciousness is being made into something transcendent, or unfalsifiable, or essentially different than physical processes because we like to make ourselves feel special in comparison to the world.
- retsibsi 7y ago
  But some of us are using the word 'consciousness' to refer to the existence of subjective experience. It may be impossible even in principle to get very far on most of the deepest questions about consciousness in this sense. But it's still real, it still matters a great deal, and we still make important decisions based on our best guesses. (Why should I care what happens to other people, and try to avoid harming them? Because they're clearly conscious, capable of joy, suffering, etc. What about other animals, like dogs and cows and chickens? That seems pretty obvious too, given our biological and behavioral similarities. What about molluscs? Hmm, there are some potentially important differences there. What about rocks? I can't know, but they have none of the features I usually associate with consciousness, and if they do have internal experience I have no idea what determines it, so I might as well continue to assume not.) As soon as you define consciousness in functional terms, you make it tractable, but you also detach it from the thing we were originally wondering about. (The problem is that purely materialist or functionalist explanations always run into the question 'but why does there have to be internal subjective experience associated with these things/events/systems, and not others?'. Consciousness itself, in the 'qualia' sense, never plays a functional role in these explanations -- and if we weren't already assuming its existence, they would give us no hint that it exists.)

cdo256 7y ago

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1] explores this exact question. In the story, a human consciousness is uploaded to a computer orbiting a planet. Meanwhile spiders on the planet go though an industrial revolution and start using ant colonies as computers, using pheromones to control the behavior of the ants. Over thousands of years the computer housing the orbital consciousness begins to fail and transmits her consciousness to an ant colony on the surface. In the second book, her brain is then duplicated across multiple colonies. Because the ant computer isn't as powerful as silicon based computers, one of her instances later realizes that she is a significantly compressed version of herself and that she doesn't have most of the old memories, capabilities or capacity for emotions that her human self had, presumably in large part also due to being transferred between three different substrates (flesh, silicon, ants). [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...

ghettoimp 7y ago
This was a fantastic book, and the first thing I thought of when seeing the article.
n4r9 7y ago
Like the other commenter I also instantly thought of this fantastic book (and follow-up). The even stronger analogy between OP's article and the book is what happens before the spiders cultivate the ants, and the knowledge that the spiders take from them. Before the spiders were building ant-computers the collective ant colony was making its own conscious decisions and was actually winning the intelligence race for a while.

golergka 7y ago

Personally, I don't see any reason not to perceive a commercial company or other similar societal structure as an AI.

6510 7y ago
People think the company is ran by people but if they step ever so slightly out of the job description (against company interests) they get marked for replacement.
- d4nt 7y ago
  I agree. Also, there are many teams or departments in companies where the humans are following the instructions of a process manual, spreadsheet or software system, without actively knowing how it works. The Company “knows” things the individual humans don’t.
thrav 7y ago
People are basically the cells of a city.

hliyan 7y ago

There is a theory (albeit unfalsifiable) that collections of communicating agents (such as human beings) may give rise to a higher order consciousness that the individual agents are not aware of, and therefore must necessarily interpret the 'will' of the higher order consciousness as merely 'emergent behavior'.

6510 7y ago
Collectively we can easily see how stupid individuals can act but individuals can also easily see how stupid a collective can behave. I think besides that obvious lack of insights (both ways) the point where we collectively engage in acts that non of us would ever do proves it is no longer the same creature.
dibujaron 7y ago
Easy enough to see in practice, though. It's fun to think of corporations as larger organisms. They regularly fight each other, eat each other, get eaten by each other, die, and reproduce. Google acquiring a startup is not much different from a whale eating a shrimp. The same analogies can be made for countries and cities, too. It's also fun to think of yourself as a giant city of smaller organisms - you've got white blood cell cops, you've got red blood cells which are basically cars on arterial highways, you've got factories and garbage trucks and libraries.

thybag 7y ago

Reminded me of the rocks xkcd https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/

lou1306 7y ago

This reminds me of the Chinese Room argument. Basically, it goes like that: I never took any Chinese lesson. However, suppose I obtain a huge instruction manual that tells me exactly which sequence of Chinese characters I should use to reply to any sequence of Chinese characters you (a native Chinese speaker) give me. Do I "know/understand" Chinese?

comepradz 7y ago
You don't know/understand Chinese. However some argue that the system of you and the instruction manual is conscious, and some other will argue further that the book is an extension of your mind, an external apparatus of thinking, or an organ that are no different from your hand. I vaguely remember some years back that someone was fighting to be allowed having his passport photo with a cyborg antenna because it helps him "hears" colour.
ajuc 7y ago
Yes - the system (you + the book) know Chinese. Let me ask you another question - when I throw a ball at you your subconcious brain has to solve a differential equation to know how to use muscles to catch that ball. Do you know how to catch a ball if you don't know the math but still can catch it?
- goatlover 7y ago
  > Yes - the system (you + the book) know Chinese. Or the system knows how to translate from English to Chinese. Human language isn't simply about following translation rules, though. It's also about communication and expressing thought. Or participating in language games. > Let me ask you another question - when I throw a ball at you your subconcious brain has to solve a differential equation to know how to use muscles to catch that ball. Why suppose the neural network needs to solve differential equations? Is that the only way to learn to catch a ball?
  - ajuc 7y ago
    > Why suppose the neural network needs to solve differential equations? Is that the only way to learn to catch a ball? Yes. You need to decide where to put your hand, how to orient it, etc in reaction to the ball movement. The answer is a solution to the differential equations, and you cannot consistently get a good answer to an equation if you don't solve it. The solution probably isn't symbolic but numeric, but that hardly changes anything - you still need a lot of math to consciously solve such an equation numerically. > Or the system knows how to translate from English to Chinese. Human language isn't simply about following translation rules, though. It's also about communication and expressing thought. Or participating in language games. human doesn't get to decide what to do in Chinese room experiment - (s)he is just a dumb CPU that does table lookups in a huge book. Every possible response to a sequence of previous messages is already written in that book (so it must be quite big ;) ). You could completely automate it, remove the human and nothing would change from the outside.

jbotz 7y ago

Here is an even more interesting question: if an ML algorithm can be considered conscious, do you even need to "run" it (whether on a computer or by a "group of people doing calculations by hand") for that consciousness to exist? An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input. So where is the consciousness, in the execution, or in the algorithm? Think of Conway's Game of Life, which has been shown to be turing-complete. The various "creatures" that exist in its worlds exist even without the program being run. We run the program only to observe them... the execution is for the external observer's benefit, the creatures exist in the "mathematical space" of the cellular automaton, not on the computer where the simulation is run. If an algorithm can be conscious, then so can one of this game's creatures, and its consciousness will be observing and interacting with the Game's mathematical reality, which will seem quite physical to that creature even without ever being simulated on any "physical" (to us) hardware. Maybe all of existence is like that, no? There are people who say that maybe our Universe is a simulation. I say sure, but it doesn't need to be "running" on anything... it just exists because the rules it follows exist mathematically. It does get simulated, to an approximation however... inside our conscious observation of it! The Universe "exists" mathematically, but a subset of it "runs" in the brains of the observers to which it gives rise... it is the ultimate strange loop, forever eating its own tail.

ryukafalz 7y ago
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot ever since reading Permutation City, which touches on that at one point. I’d highly recommend it if you haven’t read it. You’ve put the idea more succinctly than I could have, so thanks for that.
psychoslave 7y ago
>An algorithm is fully deterministic... Well, the ideality one project in its representation of an algorithm surely might feels like that. An execution of a software in perpetually moving execution stack in a broader network of extremely volatile context is an other affair.
visarga 7y ago
> An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input. Well, these are not just algorithms, they are actual agents. So they are embodied and embedded in the environment. Each action or movement can change the information that this algorithm learns from. So different previous experiences mean different agents. Also, the learning process is reliant on noise, and this can cause different outcomes. You would have to reproduce the whole environment in order to get to a situation that an agent will produce the same results given the same input. Also, laws of physics are like a fixed algorithm our brains run on. > So where is the consciousness, in the execution, or in the algorithm? Consciousness is in the triad formed of environment, agent and reward signals. It's a continuous loop of perception, judgement and action, followed by observing the reward signals. The purpose of this loop, for biological agents, is self reproduction - so it is a self reliant ultimate purpose, it needs no external purpose except this one.

sitkack 7y ago

Consciousness aside, Capitalism forms a mind over all the people that participate in it, directly or indirectly.

jonnycomputer 7y ago

Old Chinese Room argument, updated for the 2020s https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

chansiky 7y ago

So taking the question to the obvious next step: is it possible the entity of an organization of people, corporations, clubs, churches, cults, have its own conciousness (feelings, goals, awareness of itself)? Does HackerNews have a conciousness?

Accujack 7y ago
If you stretch the definition of consciousness enough, sure. I'd argue that there's a major difference between consciousness and self awareness or sentience.

anonytrary 7y ago

The group of humans would have no idea what the emergent brain is thinking -- like the cells in our body have no idea what our brains are thinking.