3 ms·
You don’t have to go down the chain, you can go up, too. E.g., groups, organizations, ecosystems, etc. It’s not that individual electrons need to be conscious.
by dr_dshiv 5y ago
You don’t have to go down the chain, you can go up, too. E.g., groups, organizations, ecosystems, etc.
It’s not that individual electrons need to be conscious. Instead, for instance, free energy minimizing systems might be conscious— and those are pervasive in the universe at large and small scale.
- scubakid 5y agoI feel like even that requires a pretty broad definition of consciousness that starts to diverge from what the term usually connotes. This strikes me as similar to the classic question of whether an ant hill could be considered conscious. In the end I guess a lot comes down to semantics/definitions.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoConsciousness is qualia, feeing, experience. So, for instance, if the feeling of dissonance and harmony has some universal characteristic of the alignment of differences into a unified flow, then one can postulate that this characteristic may have a qualitative experience that is similarly universal in those systems where it occurs.