[danbruc]

I certainly see a beach with a few hundred or so stones when I close my eyes but I don't think that matters. It is simply the idea that stones on a beach - a lot of stones on a very long beach in a very specific arrangement relentless reordered by Tom Hanks for billions of billions of years according to a very long list of rules overseen by Wilson - could really feel joy and pain that seems absurd. I mean this is a common argument that it is just the sheer scale that would be required and that we are unable to imagine that leads us astray but in the end it just seems wrong that stones on a beach can feel pain, at least to me. But if you think about a computer simulating a brain at the level of neurons, something that is somewhat in reach, does this make it any easier? Does it sound so much less absurd that a data center packed with GPUs could really feel pain?

[dwaltrip]

Stones don't communicate among themselves, and only change state under the entirely external effort of the entity that moves them. I would argue that the stones would need some mechanism for modifying their own state to even have a slim chance at consciousness. Seeing as stones are inatimate objects that can't possibly operate any mechanism, I think the idea is dead in the water.

Another way of looking at it: the significance of any particular arrangement (or sequence of arrangements) of the stones is only meaningful in the mind of the entity that is moving them around. Or perhaps any nearby viewers with the patience and far-fetched ability to make sense of the iterations of stone arrangements. The internal/external distinction between the stones themselves and the stone movers/viewers seems critical to me.

Software on the other hand... that is a bit harder to categorically dismiss. I think I can imagine software that produces an experience somewhat analogous to the human one.

[danbruc]

You need of course something moving the stones and interpreting the arrangement but there is no need to bother Tom Hanks with that. Just throw in a Roomba pushing the stones around according to the state transition function. Make it a real quick one so that something meaningful can happen before the sun dies. And for good measure throw in a simple humanoid robot with sensors and actuators from wich the Roomba receives inputs to the computation and to which it sends control signals decoded from the arrangement of the stones.

Now that is not just a pile of stones, but nothing of the added things seems to add much complexity. A robot pushing stones according to predetermined rules can be very simple. Even simpler than a Roomba would be a gantry crane above the stones, it could essentially be just a few motors, a claw, and a switch to detect the presence or absence of a stone. I also just realized that the state transition function would not be an unimaginable monster with the possibility to hide something in there. You do not need much code to simulate a neural network regardless of its size and it would probably not grow that much when encoded for a Turing machine.

Now which part of the stones and the crane feels pain and anger if a loved one dies? And we are not looking for some stones signaling certain muscle activity or the production of tears, we are looking for the internal experience of pain. Based on my believes I seem to be forced to accept that those stones can somehow be conscious and feel emotions even if it seems hopeless to understand how this works. But this also has a possibly even more disturbing consequence. If piles of stones can be conscious, what prevents other objects from that? What about stars in galaxies? What does it feel like to be a galaxy?

Software on the other hand... that is a bit harder to categorically dismiss. I think I can imagine software that produces an experience somewhat analogous to the human one.

I can not, no matter how hard I try. I can imagine a software faking human experiences, to say it feels joy or pain, I can not imagine it to actually feel it. Not at last because I can not even really say what the difference is. It seems to me that once I could imagine this for a software it would only be a small step to imagine the same for a pile of stones. The difference between a human and some software seems enormously larger than the difference between some software and a pile of stones, at least to me.

[red75prime]

If you compress all these trillions years back to one second, you'll be able to talk to the simulated person and relate to its feelings, stones will become a blur in the background and stop obscuring the view.

How such systems can have a feelings? I don't know. Probably the same way as a network of chemically/electrically activated neurons.