[nick_kline]

So consciousness is some kind of messy combination of matter, responding to inputs, to connections between particles. This feels wholly inadequate. My human consciousness is reduced when I get shot in the head but the particles are still there, so think about when my brain deteriorates, when I die. If you put my matter into a container all that matter is still there but I'm no longer able to have human consciousness (unless there is some kind of thing outside of physical laws, which I am not going to just jump to).

So this feels like a useless definition. Like the computational power of something is a product of it's mass. It's much more than that.

[ojosilva]

It's not useless, it's a valid approach to study the subject.

Consciousness here is downgraded to a very "simple form", to more fundamental components that all matter possess in a way or another. So it does not mean that a rock is sentient like your mind is. It's more like saying, ie, that quantum entanglement could be a component of consciousness. A rock could interact with quantum entanglement, therefore it would be plausible that a rock could have a tremendously primitive form of consciousness.

[perl4ever]

You can compute things by moving rocks around and placing them just so. (or using an abacus, etc)

Therefore (if you accept that intelligence is computable) there could be an intelligent mind denoted by a sufficient number of rocks over a sufficient period of time, even if it took billions of years to have a thought.

Whether "naturally" placed or by some agent.

I think this is not original of me, but I forget the source.

[fighterpilot]

This is a key question.

If we can replicate the information processing in 1 minute of brain activity by rearranging and moving rocks in a specific way over a 10 year period, would that arrangement of rocks have subject conscious states, or not?

If yes, it's a good argument in support of panpsychism, because those conscious states would seem to be substrate-independent. And if not, why does the brain have subjective states but these rocks do not? What makes our wetware particularly special?

There's clearly something profound going on here, even if it's currently beyond our ability to articulate properly within a scientific framework.

[Vampiero]

Feedback. Our brains are circuits, rocks are not. No matter how hard you try, rocks are never going to rearrange themselves if left to sit. Self-organization is very common in nature, and I find it easy to believe that consciousness is an emergent process that necessarily encompasses some level of self-organization.

[perl4ever]

>rocks are never going to rearrange themselves if left to sit

I don't understand this statement. What are mountains? What is sand? What is a planet? What is an asteroid? Where do you think rocks came from in the first place? Over substantial periods of time, rocks are always being rearranged whether or not humans interfere.

Perhaps you are drawing a distinction between being rearranged and rearranging themselves, but I don't understand that distinction. If you think that humans rearrange their own brains, I think that is an impossible thing to even define. How can anything act on itself without an intermediary? What kind of evidence is there for it? Without energy input surely you'd agree that no brain can make itself function? So how is a brain different from a waterfall or rocks moved by a river?

[fighterpilot]

> without an external agent performing these tasks.

What about an AGI running autonomously on a computer, then. Would that have subjective states like we do?

[nick_kline]

Ok, maybe not useless. It feels so far away what I imagine human or a dog's "consciousness" that it is hard to see how to rate the jump up from an ant to mouse, dog, great apes, etc.

[xyzzy21]

Basically it's physics without any specific details or actionable predictions.