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  • I made another comment pointing this out for a similar definition, but OK so awareness is being able to "recognize", and recognize in turn means "To realize or discover the nature of something" (using Wiktionary, but pick your favorite dictionary), and "realize" means "To become aware of or understand", completing the loop. I point that out, because IMO the circularity means the whole thing is useless from an empirical perspective and should be discarded. I also think qualia is just philosophical navel-gazing for what it's worth, much like common definitions of "awareness". I think it's perfectly possible in theory to read someone's brain to see how something is represented and then twiddle someone else's brain in the same way to cause the same experience, or compare the two to see if they're equivalent.

    As far as a computer process recognizing itself, it certainly can compare itself to other processes. It can e.g. iterate through the list of processes and kill everything that isn't itself. It can look at processes and say "this other process consumes more memory than I do". It's super primitive and hardcoded, but why doesn't that count? I also thinking learning is separate but related. If we take the definition of "consciousness" as a world model or representation, learning is simply how you expand that world model based on input. Something can have a world model without any ability to learn, such as a chess engine. It models chess very well and better than humans, but is incapable of learning anything else, i.e. expanding its world model beyond chess.

    If you created a computer program capable of learning patterns in the behavior of its own process(es) and learning how those behaviors are similar/dissimilar or connected to those of other processes, then yes, I’d say your program is capable of consciousness. But just adding the ability to detect its process id is simply like adding another built in sense; it doesn’t create conscious self awareness.

    I think we largely agree then, other than my quibble about learning not being necessary. A lot of people want to reject the idea of machines being conscious, but I've reached the "Sure, why not?" stage. To be a useful definition though, we need to go beyond that and start asking questions like "Conscious of what?"

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  • What do "sense" and "perceived" mean? I think they both loop back to "aware", and the reason I point that out is that circular definitions are useless. How can you say that plants lack a sense of self and consciousness, if you can't even define those terms properly? What about crown shyness? Trees seem to be able to tell the difference between themselves and others.

    As an example of the circularity, "sense" means (using Wiktionary, but pick your favorite if you don't like it) "Any of the manners by which living beings perceive the physical world". What does "perceive" mean? "To become aware of, through the physical senses". So in your definition, "aware" loops back to "aware" (Wiktionary also has a definition of "sense" that just defines it as "awareness", for a more direct route, too).

    I meant that plants don't have thoughts more in the sense of "woah, dude", pushing back on something without any explanatory power. But really, how do you define "thought"? I actually think Wiktionary is slightly more helpful here, in that it defines "thought" as "A representation created in the mind without the use of one's faculties of vision, sound, smell, touch, or taste". That's kind of getting to what I've commented elsewhere, with trying to come up with a more objective definition based around "world model". Basing all of these definitions on "representation" or "world model" seems to the closest to an objective definition as we can get.

    Of course, that brings up the question of "What is a model?" / "What does represent mean?". Is that just pushing the circularity elsewhere? I think not, if you accept a looser definition. If anything has an internal state that appears to correlate to external state, then it has a world model, and is at some level "conscious". You have to accept things that many people don't want to, such as that AI is conscious of much of the universe (albeit experienced through the narrow peephole of human-written text). I just kind of embraced that though and said "sure, why not?". Maybe it's not satisfying philosophically, but it's pragmatically useful.

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  • Yeah, reflexes could be considered a conscious effort of a part of your body. Or your immune system might be considered "conscious" of a virus that it's fighting off. What's a testable definition of "conscious" that excludes those?

    I think that "conscious" is also a relative term, i.e. "Conscious of what?" A cell in your body could be said to be conscious of a few things, like its immediate environment. It's clearly not conscious of J-pop though. But to be fair to it, none of us are "really" conscious of say Sagittarius B2 or an organism living at the bottom of the ocean.

    The best way I've found to think about it is that consciousness can be thought of as a world model. The bigger the world model, the more consciousness it could be said to have. Some world models might be smaller, but contain things that bigger ones don't though. Worms don't understand what an airplane is, but humans also don't really understand the experience of wriggling through soil.

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  • I'm not advocating for consciousness as a fundamental quality of the universe. I think that lacks explanatory power and isn't really in the realm of science. I'm kind of coming at it the opposite way and pushing for a more concrete and empirical definition of consciousness.

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  • What does "aware" mean, or "knowledge"? I think those are going to be circular definitions, maybe filtered through a few other words like "comprehend" or "perceive".

    Does a plant act with deliberate intention when it starts growing from a seed?

    To be clear, my beef is more with the definition of "conscious" being useless and/or circular in most cases. I'm not saying "woah, what if plants have thoughts dude" as in the meme, but whatever definition you come up with, you have to evaluate why it does or doesn't include plants, simple animals, or AI.

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  • When you say "aware of the delineation between self and not self", what do you mean by "aware"? I've found that it's often a circular definition, maybe with a few extra words thrown in to obscure the chain, like "know", "comprehend", "perceive", etc.

    Also, is a computer program that knows which process it is self aware? If not, why? It's so simple, and yet without a concrete definition it's hard to really reject that.

    On the other extreme, are we truly self aware? As you point out, our bodies just kind of do stuff without our knowledge. Would an alien species laugh at the idea of us being self-aware, having just faint glimmers of self awareness compared to them, much like the computer program seems to us?

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  • I don't think I'm talking about panpsychism. To me, that's just giving up and hand wavey. I'm much more interested in trying to come up with a more concrete, empirical definition. I think questions like "Well, why aren't plants conscious" or "Why isn't an LLM conscious" are good ways to explore the limits of any particular definition and find things it fails to explain properly.

    I don't think a rock or electron could be considered conscious, for example. Neither has an internal model of the world in any way.

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  • It all depends on what you mean by "conscious", which IMO doesn't fall under "Maybe everything is conscious" because that's wrongly assuming that "conscious" is a binary property instead of a spectrum that humans and plants are both on while clearly being at vastly different levels. Maybe I just have a much looser definition of "conscious" than most people, but why don't tropisms count as a very primitive form of consciousness?

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  • I tried feeding frozen peas to ducks in a pond near me. The peas mostly sank below the water immediately, and the ducks didn't seem to care for them anyways. A few of them came over to investigate and weren't interested after checking them out. I might've been doing it wrong, or maybe the ducks just were just too used to getting fed bread.

  • IMO free will is commonly misunderstood. It's not an absolute property, it's a relative statement. In other words, something doesn't "have" free will, the term is merely shorthand for "behavior that can't be predicted". To me, a rock doesn't have free will because I can use relatively simple physics to predict its behavior perfectly. Other humans have much more free will because it's much harder to predict their behavior. A bug is somewhere in the middle. To a superhuman intelligence (supercomputer, aliens, deity, take your pick), humans don't have free will, because our behavior can be perfectly predicted.

    That squares with my opinion on QM in that even if deterministic interpretations of QM are eventually rigorously ruled out, I would still be of the opinion that if we could poke through the underlying substrate and query an intelligence there, our behavior would be perfectly predictable. Much like a video game character discovering the math behind the RNG that controls their universe. So they're kind of orthogonal concepts, but somewhat related.

  • 100%, I avoid using plastics as much as possible around anything that I ingest that involved heat somewhere in the production process. Not entirely possible, but I do what I can.

  • The universe is deterministic. Quantum Mechanics doesn't really disagree with this, it's just not as popular an interpretation as the other ones. Even if deterministic QM interpretations eventually end up being ruled out rigorously, maybe we could someday "poke through" to the underlying substrate, like a video game character figuring out the seed for the RNG that determines their universe.

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  • Sounds like a bubble, which isn't a bad thing but not very common in the US IME. I haven't looked at housing prices in that area, but I'm guessing they would be obscenely expensive for most people. Even where real estate is much cheaper than that, I've only really known a few people that have done that sort of thing and they're all well-off.

    I'm also going to plug the community we've got over at !AskUSA@discuss.online, it's great for casual US-focused questions like this.

  • Probably the best traction you're going to get is in !asklemmy@lemmy.world. There exist more specific communities as listed in the other comments, but they tend to be much smaller, or defunct.

  • At a slightly lower level, I'm excited about Servo. Activity died off for a bit but it's gaining steam again. Still behind Ladybird progress-wise, but it will make a very strong foundation for a new web browser.

  • Yeah, bot posts are good IMO for things that are like once per day or less. More frequently and it can end up being spammy. OTOH, I've browsed all a few times and seen interesting posts from HN that I then went over and read, so there's something to be said for that too. Maybe if there was a more nuanced option, like "don't show me bot posts unless they've been upvoted by a non-bot" or something like that. Or maybe if bots reposting from elsewhere did that filtering beforehand, like top 10 per day or something

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  • That definitely reads as AI generated. I don't really get the point of making posts like that if you're not even going to write them yourself.

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