[throwdecro]

> you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself.

Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an awareness of itself.

[mach1ne]

Isn't that precisely what it means? You are aware of something, thus you can take it and its aspects into consideration in your calculations. You have a representation of yourself - same thing. Of course your representation may not be completely accurate, but what perception would be.

[curryst]

I don't think so. The concept of self is distinct from an image (or other representation). If I run pylint against the pylint source code, it has a representation of itself. It's not aware that those lines of code are in any way special to it. I don't think it mystically becomes self-aware because of that situation.

In your lingo, something can know what it looks like without taking its aspects into consideration.

I think the inverse is true, though: something that cannot perceive a representation of itself cannot be self-aware.

[andybak]

> Isn't that precisely what it means?

Maybe or maybe not. This is the nub of the debate. I would argue that answering "yes" to this is a partial endorsement of pan-psychism. If the ability to experience qualia is property of certain algorithms or types of information flow then it's a fundemental property of the universe.

Thought experiments about p-zombies and mind simulation are an interesting litmus test to separate different points of view on this.

[jcims]

Vegans entered the chat

(sorry) This would mean, at a minimum, that every biological entity down to single cell organisms are conscious. They could be, I don't know.

[kitd]

You say that as an outsider able to view both code and its representation. The code itself only 'sees' its representation as itself.