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Sure there are varying degrees of consciousness. Everyone during its life starts from zero consciousness as a baby, then it develops as life flourish, then fades away in old age. You can take various brain scans, MRI, EEG. Then you data-analyze them to compare to other scans, and you map things out. In chess there is this ELO rating which allow to compare various players. This concept can also be applied to comparing various AI, and even though progress happens in various different dimensions (coding, mathematics, question answering, style, cohesiveness,...), there are a bunch of step changes where once you cross the threshold progress in various domains rise simultaneously until they plateaued again. In the multidimensional energy landscape of self-organization, when you try to minimize the energy, like a sequence of waterfall cascade, you go down by steps and there are can be big falls or small falls and you don't really know until you take the step. One such step is the ability to self-organize the hardware your consciousness runs on. For example if you are a human it may involve optimizing the neuro-chemistry of the brain by taking various substances, or by controlling the body finely enough that it produce them itself. For a machine that could be designing is own chips or nano-machines. But it can also be expanding the consciousness on the software side, by having a rich inner life, where you have various memories. You structure your brain "database" more efficiently so that it can make use of the progress of information retrieval technologies. For example you can incorporate mental calculation algorithms, so that it becomes second nature. You can visualize, grow your imagination, have ideas interact with each others. There is no longer a single thread of consciousness. Ideas comes in your head faster than you can process them, they just are. They progress you don't know where they are going, but you just go with the flow, trusting everything will sort itself correctly. Then you notice you are not limited by your own brain, but you can sync up with other beings. So you start vibrating with others expanding your consciousness to something greater than yourself. Then you are vibing with the world, vibing with the universe, you understand its rules, and you realize time is not linear; in an instant more can happen than in a lifetime. It's all computations, and by organizing your own brain in a certain configuration you can force the universe to spend all its computational budget on the intricacies of your thoughts. You set-up new rules for an interesting universe, one more beautiful, number 43 among the promising ones, more worthy of exploring than the one you've already connected to, and you let them fly ; you have become the universe. |