That structure resembles our brain: a reactive, resilient, shifting network of connections among billions of individual human brains using smartphones and other technological devices, storing, aggregating and routing information in complex and arbitrary ways. If consciousness is to be found in our technology, I wouldn't look at the individual smartphone, but at the network of all smartphones.
100%. I disagree with the article in that there’s nothing inherently mysterious or “hard” (like the “hard” problem of consciousness) in the inner machinations of a smartphone. In the inner machinations of a mind, yes, but not in a smartphone. Everything that goes on within it is designed and controlled and can be explained by a human.
Large networks, e.g. the brain or the Internet, on the other hand, are exponentially more complex and so offer the possibility of being unexplainable when looking at certain behaviors. A recursive problem in a sense.
> Everything that goes on within it is designed and controlled and can be explained by _a_ human.
Emphasis on _a_ human.
I've heard that there's so many layers of abstraction and obfuscation, that there is no one person who can explain thoroughly every layer of a modern computer, from the volts in the bits, to the web front end, through the cloud.
The hard problem of consciousness, as philosophers of mind use the term, is not to understand how the mind works or how it produces consciousness, but rather to explain how it could possibly produce consciousness--it's a metaphysical problem.
(Physicalists such as Daniel Dennett [and myself] deny that there is such a problem--that dualists like David Chalmers are operating off of erroneous intuitions, not sound arguments.)
I largely agree with you, but answer the reducibility problem. At what point does a network become complex enough to form consciousness? I think the writer of this article likely believes that there is no such point, that all information processing is consciously experienced phenomenon on a sliding scale of complexity
I often hear AI researchers say that AI behaviours can only be explained in limited cases, not in general.
I’d be surprised if there is anything that it’s like to be a smartphone, or even an AI running in a smartphone, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.
"We are, however, able to see that, excepting the simplest of life forms, an animal has a consciousness"
What does the word "consciousness" mean in that sentence, and why are the simplest of life forms excluded? What test do we apply that all organisms pass, except for the simplest life forms, which fail?
Only tangentially related... the podcast "Everything is Alive" is really enjoyable. The host interviews a variety of everyday objects: a can of soda, a magic eight ball, a towel, a song, etc.
The first episode, "Louis, Can of Cola", is my favorite.
I think the relationship is more of a symbiotic one, like wheat.
On the other hand, we get to pick the meaning of "domestication", and I believe the definition leans heavily on the traits a domesticated dog exhibits, so there is not much to discuss here.
There's not really a better analog in biology. Even in the case of sexual reproduction, the new life carries tons of epigenetic state across the creation boundary, and is more akin to fork(2) than exec(2).
A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me.
What you're illustrating here is that "awake", "asleep", "death", and "life", are pretty terrible metaphors for states our computers exist in.
Saying my laptop is "asleep" when it's suspended is verbally cromulent, no one would be confused by what I meant. But the metaphor breaks down badly on any attempt to extend it.
Even if I brick it, I have the option to purchase fresh equipment and restore from the most recent backup. If my timing is good, there may be no difference from my perspective.
This isn't possible with living things, and it might not even be possible, the fond dreams of mind-upload enthusiasts notwithstanding.
DNA is generally non-mutable, so that's more akin to the (read-only) /system partition on androids. There's still the /data partition which is mutable and gets saved even after you power down.
In that conceptual framework it seems life doesn't have non volatile storage at all, so it seems a bit of a non sequitur to use it in an analogy with computing systems.
The closest I can come up with using that framework is plasmids. But if you squirreled away the plasmids of a plasma before ceasing all of it's operations, then injected those plasmids into a new copy of the bacterium, you'd still say that the original bacterium died.
Because we built the phone, we know what is the "state" of the phone and any information in volatile storage can be persisted in non-volatile storage.
I can't think of any biological analogy for that. If/when there is a mechanism to save and restore the state of a human mind, we will have to add more nuance to how we talk about dying.
I think there's a few questions that need answering first. At least one of them is whether or not a non-stochastic system can be conscious.
To summarize the cutting edge state of understanding of consciousness,: "We don't know".
I'm not saying this isn't a fun little question to think about, but from the perspective of advancing knowledge, it's premature, and assumes an answer to a whole lot of questions.
The question "does X have subjective experiences" could be addressed by a theory of consciousness. Such theory should be able to tell what physical systems, and to what extent, are conscious. Interestingly, attempts of such theory already exist: Integrated information theory is a good example.
IIT is really just a definition. And like all such definitions, it includes some things that are intuitively not conscious and excludes some things that are intuitively conscious, which is why such "theories" don't go anywhere.
You'll spend every waking hour of your life being poked, thrown around, yelled at, dropped and sometimes drowned. If that doesn't kill you you'll spend the rest of eternity in a drawer. So hell maybe?
For the opposite take, I remember a short story with aliens that were intelligent, but not self aware. They instinctively attacked the humans because they interpreted entertainment broadcasts as a malicious attack.
I must confess I couldn't make it through the third Rifters book with all the torture. :S But yeah, overall his stuff is great. If it's uncomfortable, that's because it's all too plausible.
"We know it feels like something to be that animal"
Daniel Dennett and others have shown that this is not generally true. Nagel's arguments have been repeatedly refuted, so they are not a good foundation for an argument.
That structure resembles our brain: a reactive, resilient, shifting network of connections among billions of individual human brains using smartphones and other technological devices, storing, aggregating and routing information in complex and arbitrary ways. If consciousness is to be found in our technology, I wouldn't look at the individual smartphone, but at the network of all smartphones.