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What makes you assume thermostats aren't conscious?

• daveguy 3y ago
  Because they don't have any other higher level function that could reason about the state other than a single binary response. If intelligence is a continuum you might say it is at the lowest end (a bit state and actuation on that state). But consciousness seems more like a meta-intelligence that would require more than one bit and one actuation.
• bumby 3y ago
  I don’t make any of those assumptions. My point was that I also don’t know that we can distill consciousness to strict materialism until we can find the mechanisms to explain the hard problem of consciousness.
• therobots927 3y ago
  this really is getting at something important. however the question I would pose is, if the thermostat is conscious, does it have a sense of self, i.e. an identifiable boundary between itself and the world around it? I would say not. My understanding is that humans have an identifiable region(s) of the brain that correspond to a sense of self: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_basis_of_self#:~:text=Two%20areas%20of%20the%20brain,the%20ability%20to%20self%2Dreflect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_basis_of_self#:~:text=T.... I think in a lot of these conversations people say consciousness and assume that consciousness always mirrors their own, which just so happens to come along with a sense of self for 99.9% of sober individuals. So I think it's important to distinguish between the two things.
  • bumby 3y ago
    Would this imply that someone who claims to lose the sense of self (or seems to realize it as a hallucination) through “sober” techniques like meditation would no longer be conscious?
    • therobots927 3y ago
      Quite the opposite. I'm saying that a sense of self is not necessary for consciousness. And that many people write off simple objects as having consciousness when really what they mean as that those objects don't have a sense of self.