[jprupp]

What is it like to be the Internet?

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.

[blonde_ocean]

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.

[swilliamsio]

> 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.

[jibal]

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.)

[ballark]

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

[thecupisblue]

When it understands that it is a network and can rework itself and its surroundings, working as a homogenous unit interacting with its environment.

[ben_w]

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.

[tshaddox]

The internet isn’t exactly new in this regard. You could just as easily ask things like “what is it like to be European society?”

[k__]

Could society be a body, the internet its nerves and the economy its blood?

[jibal]

You're asking if a metaphor could be reality. Obviously not ... it's just a metaphor.

[ineedasername]

You've got to put people in there somewhere.

[taneq]

We’re the mitochondria.

[dylan604]

People are the virus

[k__]

The brain cells?

[tomrod]

Lymph system.

[xwdv]

The DNA.

[frosted-flakes]

Like Jane in the Ender's Game series. Fascinating stuff.