[brotchie]

12 months ago I would have strongly disagreed with your first sentence, but after a load of reading on Physics, Philosophy, and Neuroscience, my views have changed.

I am still unable to reconcile my "internal" conscious experience with our current understanding of Physics. I'm a materialist, however I'm trending towards the believe that consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems; that is, our "internal" conscious experience is part of the "fabric of reality" and simply comes into being once matter is of a certain level of interconnectedness.

In essence, all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience. However, only groupings of matter that have massive interconnectedness (i.e. animal brains) experience what we would typically describe as consciousness. Perhaps, at a global scale, the internet is weakly "conscious". Perhaps, once we forge ahead with bio-mimetic arrays of neural networks, we'll start to induce artificial conscious experience in "dumb" matter.

Christof Koch has an excellent book "Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist" along these lines.

[alokm]

I also concur that "consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems". But "all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience" is really a philosophical question. Internet can be considered as a living being with different people acting as different components and communicating with each other the way neurons do. But is the internet as a whole, not its participants, conscious as a whole? That is a tough question.

I will try and read up the book you suggested. And I will point towards a very interesting theory I happened to have worked on (as a software developer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory which tries to quantify consciousnesses based on this interconnectedness.

[brotchie]

I just looked back through parts of Koch's book. He was indeed talking about IIT. The wiki article on IIT is interesting, I didn't realise IIT had such a rigorous mathematical definition! I'll read further.

[scotty79]

I think interconnectedness is necessary but not sufficient. For conciousness you also need interaction with environment.