[bheadmaster]

Do you, then, agree that a machine that is built to work in the same manner as that single-cell organism (which I assume should be possible with the current technological level humans are at) is also conscious?

That path would lead to a conclusion that all matter is, in some way, conscious. I don't disagree, but I find that such definition of consciousness diverges from what we usually mean by it - a walking, talking being that has thoughts and can communicate them to us, or something.

[joshuahedlund]

> which I assume should be possible with the current technological level humans are at

More of an aside, but we are way way way way below the technological level necessary to construct a machine of the same complexity as a self-replicating self-organizing single-cell organism. Nano scale is nano. We're just barely figuring out how to consistently and accurately modify several nucleotides at once, and not even by creating our own tools but by clumsily repurposing pre-existing bacterial tools we happened to stumble across.

[bheadmaster]

Interesting, I haven't really thought much about the details of such construction.

Though in principle, it's still the same. Long age and randomness of the universe have allowed it to perform a quite exhaustive brute-force search of all possible configurations of atoms, eventually stumbling upon a self-replicating configuration from which we have evolved, but humans could theoretically find one from scratch too, it would just take too much time, like reversing a cryptographic hash.

[edgyquant]

>Do you, then, agree that a machine that is built to work in the same manner as that single-cell organism (which I assume should be possible with the current technological level humans are at) is also conscious?

No, not without serious proof.

[nextaccountic]

But where is the serious proof that single cell organisms are conscious?

(Can I even prove that I'm myself conscious?)

[lostmsu]

It is not too far from the usual meaning if you take it to be a number instead of boolean. E.g. humans ~100, rat ~1, single-cell ~1e-8, etc