[zkmon]

Probably they should start by NOT treating the consciousness as a non-physical special thing. Maybe it's not a thing to search for at all. At what point did it become a thing? Separate from chemical and physical interactions between elements?

When you redefine consciousness as just any other chemical, electrical or physical thing, suddenly it's everywhere. You don't need to search for it. The river which finds its way to ocean, has it. The earthquake which decides when to erupt has it. The electrons which decide to jump across orbitals have it.

The confusion is around cause and effect. The standard notion is that a conscious agent can initiate an effect without a cause. A boulder doesn't roll over and hit another unless someone moved it in the first place. It doesn't decide to move and hit another. However this distinction barely survives on the temporal sequencing of cause and effect. That temporal sequence is only valid in a very narrow context and range.

We should stop seeing consciousness as a thing.

[notarobot123]

However consciousness is defined its evidently an emergent phenomenon. Emergent properties are real even if they are not a "thing" in themselves. Being rooted in a material reality doesn't prevent emergence of something else/additional that has qualities not easily understood by just understanding the individual mechanisms that give rise to it.

[pyeri]

It became a thing due to the experience of self-reflection. The million dollar question is how come humans (and few other organisms) are able to self reflect on their biology, life situations, logic, math and even consciousness itself? However complex and sophisticated a machine's brain is, be it biological or mechanical (AI/AGI), no known laws of science allows it to self-reflect. This is famously called "the hard problem of consciousness" in philosophy which remains unresolved to this day.

[zkmon]

Self-reflecting may not be the distinct enough feature. Any physical/chemical/electrical reaction can be termed as self-reflecting, as it reflects on what just happened and then responds with an effect. AI is already able to reflect on it's outputs and refine them, and distinguish between the user and it's own identity. Living things have evolved senses and long-term memory to help them with faster macro-responses beyond the usual physical reactions.

When a ball hits a bat, the ball also has a short-term memory and sense in the forms of how the inter-molecular forces detect and respond to the event of getting too close to the molecules of the bat and react with a repelling force. A more evolved form would be your consciousness.

Further, a lot of living things on earth might not have self-awareness.

[visarga]

It doesn't reflect itself, we only see the UI of a complex process, not the real thing. We don't understand what happened in our brains any better for being able to feel conscious. We can only be conscious of what is cost effective and cost necessary to feel, in order to persist and survive. Animals for example and primitive humans could reproduce without understanding reproduction mechanisms, just the operational side.

[Tadpole9181]

> However complex and sophisticated a machine's brain is, be it biological or mechanical (AI/AGI), no known laws of science allows it to self-reflect.

...What? If a human brain can, that's quite literally proof a machine can? We are made out of matter that obeys the laws of physics.

And we have never made a machine remotely complicated enough to mimick a human brain. LLMs are the closest we've ever come, and they're not even close. Nor are the even made in a way condusive to doing so (focused on generating requested output, not postulating randomly). So as to the mechanical machine specifically, nothing exists to even be capable of being observed to make such a claim!

[cyclopeanutopia]

> At what point did it become a thing?

Early on and for obvious reasons - it is pretty easy to observe in oneself, much easier than discovering electrons. ;)

[bawolff]

But its also pretty hard to observe in others, which makes it hard to come up with a satisfying definition. Without a concrete definition, you can't really do science with it.

[david-gpu]

Alan Wallace wrote a short essay on this subject titled The Taboo of Subjectivity. It is available online for free, if you are curious.

[cyclopeanutopia]

Yes, but that's exactly what I meant - the idea is prescientific.

[teekert]

Agreed, what’s much more interesting is to focus on being able to model the world around you, play out scenarios in that model and make better predictions, and consequently, decisions because of that ability. (Of course “better” is still a term up for scrutiny.)

I feel that this is what we will ultimately conclude is the thing that makes us feel “conscious”. We model the world, but with ourselves in it. We need some sense of self to do this. Doesn’t mean this can’t be done in (probably) a million different ways.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information.

[soundworlds]

I do think the last 100 years' assumption of "it's physical material or it doesn't exist" should not be so easily accepted as fact.

It's like saying love, or nation states, or music doesn't exist. These things exist as much as it can matter to human experience, but you can't explain them by materiality alone.