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Much of the confusion here is from terms that you use like "become conscious", which binarizes it.
When run, that program will have a very simple model that in
Much of the confusion here is from terms that you use like "become conscious", which binarizes it.
When run, that program will have a very simple model that includes only a few things like stdout. More complex programs will have models that represent more things. A game of tic tac toe written in Python is conscious of the state of the board, because it models it.
It's not "when does it become conscious.", it's "how much is it conscious of?". Asking the prior question is like asking "When does someone become rich?" or "When is the apple ripe?"
This isn't about ghosts. This is exactly a way of looking at it that provides a concrete, falsifiable definition, because far too many people are talking right past each other whenever "consciousness" comes up. This is trying to get past the magic words, and get at something useful.
The Map is not the Territory. In all your posts you seem to believe a map of data equals consciousness/qualia experience of said data. Computer 0s and 1s make Maps. Qualia is an actual Territory. There is nothing you can do with maps that equals a territory.
> like "become conscious", which binarizes it.
Only if you pigeonhole me.
There are countless things where we recognize they are on a spectrum yet we use shortcuts in language to specify a sufficient threshold. If you don't believe me, may I introduce to you the color blue. Or any other color for that matter.
There is still the aspect that even when we consider consciousness to lie upon a continuum this does not mean that the function yields a non-zero result (or even approximately) prior to some threshold. In this case there is no ambiguity of "becomes conscious" as you can interpret this in the most weak form of consciousness. If you believe that the consciousness is only zero at the domain minimum then please state so, as I believe you are smart enough to not misinterpret my meaning and we can actually have a productive conversation. If you believe in that and also that it is a very slow growing function until a certain point, well... if you're going to be fucking pedantic then be fucking pedantic. In either case, you don't have to force this conversation into an argument and reconstruct it so that you're smart and I'm dumb. Who knows that relationship and such definitions are typically obtuse anyways.
So please, engage with at least a little good faith here.
> This isn't about ghosts.
If you want to purposefully misinterpret me, okay. We're done.
Don't talk about people "talking past one another" when you are egregiously misinterpreting. In any conversation you have to make sure that you are correctly decoding the other person's words. At least if you do indeed want to "get at something useful."
I realize you're using ghosts as an analogy. I'm saying this isn't about anything mystical. I'm exactly trying to avoid any woo, by introducing more concrete definitions.
I'm not trying to pigeonhole you. I do believe that consciousness is only zero at the domain minimum and it's a slowly growing function, but I disagree that there's any sort of "certain point". Humans are "more conscious" than cats (and better terminology is that they are conscious of more things than cats, or their world model encompasses more than cats, or something like that), but that doesn't mean humans are conscious and cats aren't.
My entire point is that "consciousness" is entirely unlike "blue". You can ask the question "is this blue?" and have a coherent answer. You can't ask the question "is this conscious?". You need to ask the question "what is this conscious of?".
> I realize you're using ghosts as an analogy
I think you are missing the point. The analogy is about why burden of proof is in a certain direction and the error you're making in logic is the exact same those that argue for ghosts make. It is also a call to "Ghost in the machine"
> I'm saying this isn't about anything mystical.
You may think this, but you are relying on mysticism. But don't think this is me calling you dumb. It's so fucking easy to accidentally invent ghosts. There's a reason it takes so long to invent new knowledge, why it took humans so long to get to this point. Because we keep unintentionally inventing ghosts along the way. In the same advice I gave to the other person you're arguing with, stop trying to do it all on your own. Maybe you are smarter than the millions of people who have tried to figure it out before you, but certainly you have to recognize that leveraging the works of others will greatly increase your chances of success, right? You didn't try to invent calculus from scratch, so why this?
> I'm not trying to pigeonhole you.
I don't believe you are trying to, but there's plenty of things I try not to do and fail at. I am frustrated, but not angry. Like what makes you think I don't think humans are more conscious than cats? I've explicitly stated we're in agreement in a continuum. But you do seem to still have ignored the part of semantics with regards to thresholds and come on, if you understand don't argue something you know I'm not arguing. If you think the semantic difference is critical, then be fucking pedantic, not continue to talk at such a high level. But maybe you think our fictitious conscious function is linearly growing. I would highly doubt that. There's quite a large gap between many creatures. Not to mention that even in a single person we see consciousness rapidly develop during childhood. So I don't know why you're harping on this point, because I haven't seen any single person in the comments contend with this argument.
> You can ask the question "is this blue?" and have a coherent answer.
But this is wrong! This is demonstrably false. We don't even have to look at people with colorblindness nor people from history[0] (I specifically used blue because the history part makes this far more apparent), optical illusions[1], nor other (mother) languages[2]. While everyone is going to agree that #0000ff is blue, people are not going to agree on #7B68EE, which plenty will call purple. Here's a literal example[3]. This is the point with this example. It is easy to think that these are discrete terms but concepts like blue (or any other color) are categorical representations, not discrete. They also have multi-dimensional boundaries and there's a continuum of disagreement by people when you move from one category to another. It helps to create subcategories, but Turquoise is still a blue that many people will call green[4]. Worse, the same person can disagree with themselves, and no way is that coherent. Fwiw, I score 0 on this test[5], so if you want to see if we disagree you can check (I've also been tested in person).
> You need to ask the question "what is this conscious of?".
Whatever answer anyone gives, is almost certainly wrong.
The thing is, everything is fuzzy. Embrace the chaos, because if we're going to talk about brains and consciousness and abstractions, well you're not going to be able to work with things that are concrete. But, this too is fuzzy and I think you're likely to misinterpret. Just because everything is fuzzy doesn't mean there aren't things that are more wrong than others. It's more that you can't have infinite precision. So stop trying to deal in absolute answers, especially when we're in topics that people are have been unable to solve for thousands of years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/colors/comments/1ao2osm/is_this_color_blue_or_purple/ https://www.reddit.com/r/colors/comments/1ao2osm/is_this_col...
[4] https://www.color-meanings.com/shades-of-blue-color-names-html-hex-rgb-codes/ https://www.color-meanings.com/shades-of-blue-color-names-ht...
[5] https://www.xrite.com/hue-test https://www.xrite.com/hue-test