2 ms·
What I understood from GP was the possibility of some fragment of consciousness in that small bit of tissue. Humanity isn't in the fragments, though, it's in th
by jdiff 3y ago
What I understood from GP was the possibility of some fragment of consciousness in that small bit of tissue. Humanity isn't in the fragments, though, it's in the structure of the whole. It doesn't matter much if it was human brain tissue or animal brain tissue, at the levels we seem to be talking about they work identically.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoThe problem is we're trying to second guess what consciousness is, and win the battle by defining the word in a convenient, but binary way. Technically we have no clue if humanity is conscious. We only know "I am conscious, and those other things are humans like me, so I think they may also be". Some extend this to animals (which they should) but try to draw some random line like "if it can't recognize itself in a mirror, it's not conscious" but even a fly may recognize itself in a mirror occasionally. It's not a magic rule. Let's face it, just like intelligence is much simpler and much more pervasive than we thought (just put neurons in a big network), consciousness is likely everywhere around us. It may simply be a conscious universe. There's nothing special about the substrate and constitution of animate matter, compared to what we consider inanimate matter, except that we're organized to preserve low entropy and transform inputs into outputs in complex ways. So are machines, computers and AI. And so the debate on how to classify this dish of neurons seems superfluous. We should respect all systems and try to be in harmony with them.