4 ms·
Meaningful. Sensible. Coherent. Our conscious experience is NOT random nonsense. An analogy, tune an old analog TV to a station and you get a meaningful pictur
by poikroequ 2y ago
Meaningful. Sensible. Coherent. Our conscious experience is NOT random nonsense.
An analogy, tune an old analog TV to a station and you get a meaningful picture with meaningful sound. Tune it to a station that doesn't exist, and you get random static and white noise, not meaningful.
If computers are producing conscious experience, it's going to be the latter, random and incomprehensible. The underlying computation does NOT matter in this case, because computers are simply incapable of producing meaningful conscious experience.
Maybe consciousness is an inevitable consequence of neural activity, but the complex coherent consciousness we experience today is most certainly a product of natural selection. That much is no accident.
- butlike 2y agoThe picture and sound is a signal meaningful _to you_. The static and white noise may be meaningful signal at a level that's inherently not meaningful to you. The pattern the static signal creates could be analogous to the 'random pattern of neurons firing in the synapse'. You flash enough patterns of that signal and a specific combination could be considered "a thought." Who knows. But if that happens, natural selection boils down to an iterative loop of: If not dead, try ____.