[ExI] Would you consider this thermostat to be conscious?

Jason Resch jasonresch at gmail.com
Fri Apr 9 18:19:26 UTC 2021


Using the definition of consciousness as "awareness of information," then
consciousness requires both information and a system to be informed.

Any computational process that reacts to the presence of information to
enter one of two or more different states would be informed by that
information, so we could conclude it is conscious of that information.

In that sense, conditional statements (if, switch, while, until, etc.) are
the 'atoms' of consciousness. That is where all consideration,
discrimination, and differentiation of information occurs in any program.

In our brains, if statements are involved in every neuron's decision to
fire. Artificial neurons are themselves universal logic gates, in that they
can be used to implement any system of logic gates.

Hierarchies of processing at different levels can build up to represent
informational states of arbitrary complexity, providing for an infinity of
possible conscious states.

At least, these are my current thoughts on the matter.

Jason



On Friday, April 9, 2021, Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Question for everyone.
>
> We define consciousness In the Representational Qualia Theory statement to
> be "Computationally bound elemental intrinsic qualities like redness and
> greenness".  A minimum level of consciousness is specified as anything that
> has at least two pieces of phenomenal information, like two pixels of
> either redness or greenness, being computationally bound.  There would not
> be any other conscious information...  Nothing like knowledge of oneself
> perceiving those colors, no ability to plot the end of humanity....)  Just
> 2 elemental pieces of phenomenal information computationally bound, nothing
> else.
>
> We give an example of a conscious thermostat, that according to that
> definition, would be considered conscious, even though only minimally so.
>
> Would all you guys consider such to be conscious, also?
>
> Why or why not?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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