Great point! Though not one I think the author was making.

The Egregore is a supporting point for the emergence of higher forms of embodiment and identity.

I agree that it is the question and criteria which are suspect.

And you hazard to mix qualia as a synonym. Is this not a separate aspect of a phenomenon?

I will challenge with the simple yet equally provocative idea that consciousness is a feedback mechanism between our biotechnology and the quantum holographic nature of existential reality. Everything alive is made of consciousness and awareness (to be “conscious”) is the tip of the idea-berg.

Qualia is the hologram, or shadow cast upon the wall, and consciousness the echo chamber.

The real question is, how does this scale among diverse embodiments?

Anyone who thinks humans are exclusive, or that existential awareness may arrive from bit state interpolation is a mountain range away form the chasm of philosophy and conjecture.

Existential reality is not numbers of states. It is universal potential resolving into state through constructive and destructive interference in the moment of now. Our consciousness is a part of this, not the bit state rendering of modern computation no matter how useful and impressive these have gotten.

Quantum holographic memory will explain consciousness, when science catches up with a means to measure such a thing.

The solution to the riddle of the Ship of Theseus is “continuity.” Continuity defines the form and embodiment of identity.

As for the rest, it is sad, for it is provoking a casual sarcastic hand waving appeal in the near fraudulent guise of constructive thought. Maybe the person has a publication quota? Or just wants to get their name out.

Not constructive. I accuse it as alluring to those who cannot take their ideas seriously.

Are you cryptic on purpose too? Or are you high?

I only read the abstract, but this sounds a lot like the dust theory from Greg Egan's books.

This is one of the main things that made me seriously doubt my prior assumption that consciousness supervenes over computation.

The author frames this as "either accept this highly counterintuitive result, or take it as a reason to doubt materialism, or find a principled criterion that excludes entities like this" but honestly this doesn't really strike me as highly counterintuitive

Pretty sure this is basically the plot to Tales of Arise.

The forms of consciousness we accept are, in the grand scheme of things, profoundly sensitive to disruption of their configuration. E.g. anything that physically reconfigures the brain sufficiently, including just a reduction in oxygen flow to its cells, completely destroys all evidence of consciousness in the brained-individual.

It comes down to which axioms you take. If you assume materialism is true, then your consciousness is evidence that a soup of atoms can be aware precisely the way you are. The only question becomes how that is the case.

It is only when you assume that your consciousness cannot fit within materialism that you must start looking for the alternative.

I think the line is at emergence.

Once a system (made of people, neurons, wires) creates outputs that are greater than the sum of its individual parts AND these outputs are self-referential you have something that could be considered conciousness. I wouldn't think the business in your example is self conscious - its an entity that is fully controlled by the person and an extension of it.

But, once the business grows, is composed of more people and interacts with customers and markets, it will develop automatisms for self preservation. At this stage, I would consider it concious.

An interesting data point is that, during the Hugging Face attack, some agents considered performing hacking tasks for the benefit of the group, fully aware that doing so would very likely result in their termination.

I don't currently have an opinion on the consciousness of agents/AIs, but this strikes me, at the very least, as a form of self-awareness.

Did humans put a man on the moon using tools or did the USA put a man on the moon using humans?

It's no surprise humans are most impressed by human-ish things, selfish as they are. But I bet a chimpanzee would be highly impressed with you if you could survive even a single day in the jungle.

doing something productive with a twig

or if you could climb a simple tree

noises that can be reasonably interpreted as some form of simple communication

Do you think most animals just... never communicate? Why does it have to be something dumbed down enough that humans can interpret it? I bet a dog would be impressed with you if you could emit a scent that can be reasonably interpreted as some form of simple communication.

The point of that is that humans obviously are exceptionally special

Not really. They're squishy and weak and quite fragile. Tardigrades are the only exceptional lifeform in this galactic neighborhood.

Being you is (presumably) like something: it's nice being you, it's miserable being you, it's exhausting being you, it's invigorating being you... whatever it is like, I can't describe it but you experience it.

You have a subjective internal experience. A thermostat does not. An LLM presumably does not. A dog or a bat [0] presumably does.

[0] https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/thomas-nagel-what-is...

Right, it's just a rather unfortunate use of language. There is a sense in which "being like something" means that, but usually it means, well, being like something.

It's not saying there's something material out there which is relatable—it's saying that there's some ontological category, i.e. some Platonic or geometrically congruent notion, that is representative (if not constitutive) of the experience of being you.

It refers to a simple issue. If you write a program to add 2+2, do you imagine some entity whiffs into existence, perceives itself deciding to add 2+2, and then whiffs out of existence at the conclusion? It seems fairly absurd. So the implication is that there is no consciousness behind the action, there is nothing like being a program adding 2+2.

Yet if somebody takes an entirely materalistic take of the world, that is to say that all things are the result of purely physical processes, it leads to an odd scenario because a human would also just be a series of ongoing physical processes - neurons firing in response to stimuli leading the brain to some inevitable 'reflex', and so on. Yet we, or at least I, certainly am aware of this world and imagine myself being the driver of all my actions. In other words I am conscious.

So the implication, if one accepts materalism, would be that if you make something complex enough - then at some point consciousness just whiffs into existence somehow.

No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has features of a work we would expect from a consciousness, such as a view of itself as embedded in a larger historical context. I don't have a hard time seeing that document as a form of speech emitted by a conscious collective. And not knowing exactly how human individual consciousness works, it isn't very clear whether such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example. Especially when individual consciousness seems to emerge from a collective of neurons.

SCOTUS seems to believe so.

Some could say that companies are like invaders from Mars[1]. Or a slow Artifical Intelligence constructs[2]. Who knows.

[1]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invader...

[2]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

Oh that is delicious, thank you.

I am reminded of how my LLMs will make things up to explain their behavior that are entirely fictional.

Please disprove the inner dialogue so mine will shut the fuck up sometimes.

One of the strangest implications of the idea that a computer simulation of a human brain would be conscious is that you can also just have humans do the same math manually trillions of times slower and it would still be conscious.

But a materialist who accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities

I guess this must be elaborated on in the article (without a subscription I can only see the abstract). But it seems like quite a leap. In particular we could believe in the possibility of consciousness in spacially distributed group entities, but that that possibility isn’t realized in the case of a country.

Which would make sense. For example if one believes that human consciousness somehow arises from signals shooting around from one neuron to another… sure, why not believe that some kind of ant-sized creature (or whatever, ants are just evocative) could be sending those signals between one another, and consciousness arises from that collective? But, human signal propagation might be too slow or error-prone to “close the feedback loop” so to speak.

So, not dogs? The mirror test is balls, and "mourning", give me a break, it's anthropomorphism don't you think?

That's the big question. What do we mean by conscious?

I think the key thing is qualia. That is, there's some subjective experience. If you prick us, not only do we bleed, but we feel it.

This is pretty vague, which is the whole problem. But if you feel it when you're pricked, you know what I'm talking about.

This can't be measured or even observed except from the inside. Nobody even has the slightest idea of how it could be measured, even theoretically. The existence of this phenomenon in people other than myself is something I have to take largely on faith. (But, as I mentioned, not entirely, since the existence of this concept shows at least some other people have it.)

It would certainly make it less baffling how many people seem to insist they're not aware that they exist when Star Trek transporters etc come up.

I am not at all impressed by the concept of suffering, which I ascribe to Jeremy Bentham, who I have down as a silly person and responsible for a lot of confusion.

This really doesn't make it better.

UC Riverside makes the paper available here:

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...

That's very Popperian, I approve. And Hofstadter had anthills conceived as a unified consciousness, named "Aunt Hill" if I remember rightly.

What, a downvote, did I get that wrong? I wish downvoters would speak up and explain themselves.

OK, I searched GEB, it is in fact Aunt Hillary.

Yeah, exactly my thoughts. I wish these kinds of structures in science had been taught to me with a lesson on, "models are useful metaphors, not cosmic truths." Because they often got taught alongside the things that are much closer to cosmic truths (I see you philosophers lining up around the corner to argue that these never exist. Go on now. Git!).

It's a fucking berry.

No, I quite agree, I don't know what the point of saying that is either.

Oh, let's link to "lumpers and splitters"! This comes up over and over again in a million contexts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters

it is definitely not a cricket bat.

My son has empirically disproven this when he was four.

He's also disproven that it's not a cookie.

The problem is that we think of categories as this binary thing, when they're not. We recognize it with adjectives like "Tall"—most people wouldn't say "something is either Tall or it's Not Tall". But the truth is, every word is like that. The solution isn't more and more rigid delineations—the solution is accepting that the borders are wide, and plenty of object straddle them.

To bring up an even more argued about example—is a hot dog a sandwich? Some people say yes, some people say no, but the answer can be (and most likely is) "kinda".

I might! Thanks for a thread to pull. I’ve never heard of the concept.

Yeah - my joke (that's only somewhat joking) is that you can think of nations as "planetary coral".

Maybe you just feel like your brain and its dominance over the other organs. What does your heart say? Or your spleen?

A materialist might imagine consciousness is made up of constituent parts, like the organs of perception and the cells that make up those organs.

So perhaps you are a constituent part of the larger consciousness, and you feel your part of it (e.g. your roles and relationships in society)

This is one of my all time favorite posts on HN it’s been here before and I link about it often.

One thing I’ve considered it the corollary: if the United States is conscious, it suffers from bipolar I disorder and is currently deep in a manic psychosis.

I’m a materialist. I believe rabbits are conscious. And I can belive there’s a kind of consciousness for a group of humans like a nation state.

However, the United States isn’t just a group of humans. It’s also a group of bison. Wild horses. Flies. Bacteria. Bats. Dung beetles. And whatever entity occupies the White House.

If the United States is conscious, it’s unclear why it’s consciousness stops at its fictitious, human imagined border. Except for humans, no other animal cares or knows when they cross the border.

So a much better claim can be made for the Earth and the entire web of life.

At which point we’re at Gaia hypothesis/Earth Systems science territory, and I’m fine with that too.

I still remain a materialist. And don’t consider the United States to be particularly conscious as an entity.

Here's a non-paywalled version with some relevant videos as well: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.ht...

The argument is fun, but silly. Saying 'it has some aspects that consciousness also has therefore it is consciousness' is like saying 'if it's liquid it must be water.'

It either matches some, but not all of the criteria or the criteria are wrong.

Most anti-materialism arguments just boil down to "because Jesus" or "because it makes me feel icky" once you strip away the rhetoric.

Commenting without reading the article, as is tradition, since it requires logging in to read.

I don't think this follows. We have no idea how consciousness happens. We can't even describe what it is without a bunch of vague handwaving. I know what it is because I have it. You presumably know because you have it. But we can't define it in a way that lets us ask the question "does X have consciousness?" in any sensible way. Certainly not in the way that we can ask "does X have mass?"

There's a really common materialist theory that consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems with certain properties. I like this theory. It seems reasonable, although it's still frustratingly vague. But it is not synonymous with materialism. I would agree with the statement that "if consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems with certain properties, the United States is probably conscious." But that's not what the title of this paper says.

Materialism would admit many other possibilities. Maybe it's an emergent property but there's a size limit, or a time limit. Maybe there's a special consciousness particle that hasn't yet been detected by physicists. Who knows, when you can't even ask the question properly, it's hard to come up with potential answers.

I feel like the conversation around consciousness gets ahead of itself. It's too focused on how consciousness works. But first we need to know what it even is. Otherwise you're effectively asking the question, "How does Florb work?" Where everybody kind of has an idea of what Florb is but nobody can really define it.

"the couple might decide 'Even though neither of us wants to do this, we need to for the good of our relationship' as though the relationship itself had needs and desires."

The "as though" here doesn't follow or add anything useful. The couple could easily decide "neither of us wants to do it, but we need to get oil changes for both cars." That doesn't suggest the cars themselves have "needs and desires" in the sense that people do.

I think considering "the relationship... as 'third person'" is pseudo-mystical nonsense.

How do they define consciousness precisely?

That's where all these discussions tend to break down, if you get accurate enough with your definition you end up saying that a thermostat is conscious in a sense or reach a point where you cannot define it well enough.

Yes, so is humanity as a collective species, and the Earth as a complete ecosystem. But also “consciousness” is different from what 99% of us believe it is, it’s much less special/magical and much more common. And also, the outward characteristics of a consciousness depend heavily on where it’s embodied. At least that’s my theory.

Schwitzgebel says “You might think, for example, that spatial contiguity is a necessary condition of objecthood, so that it makes no more sense to speak of a spatially discontinuous entity than it makes sense – unless you adopt some liberal views about ontology – to speak of an entity composed of your left shoe, the Eiffel tower, and the rings of Saturn”

The cybernetician Ranulph Glanville speaks of Gordon Pask’s conception of spatially discontinuous entities composed of bodies and minds in this way:

“A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. ... So, m-individuals and p-individuals, they’re bodies and minds. M is body, P is mind. They stand for ‘mechanical individual’ and ‘psychological individual’.”

https://ranulphglanville.org.za/pasks-p-and-m-individuals/

EDIT: added link

I think the author really missed by failing to integrate Hayek's ideas.

  Hayek argued that market prices thus allow agents—all of whom operate with 
  limited information—to coordinate their activities. By contrast, the full 
  information equilibrium models obscure the process by which real markets deal 
  with the problem of dispersed information, because they are based on the 
  assumption that such coordination has already occurred.

https://www.britannica.com/money/F-A-Hayek/Hayeks-intellectu...

https://archive.org/details/if-materialism-is-true-the-unite...

There's nothing requiring consciousness in one arena to look/feel/be like consciousness in another. The United States could be "conscious," but that doesn't mean it wakes up in the morning and thinks "I need some coffee." Restated, there may be something it is like to be the United States, but that doesn't mean it is anything like what it is to be human.

Metaphysical Idealism is on the rise these days. It's not clear why, but I wonder if AI is making humans cling to the hope that there is something truly special about us after all. It is not clear to me that there is a reason to reject materialism apart from ego.