[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[John Clark]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2026 at 3:46 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> I am afraid you have chopped up my replies to the point of reversing or
> entirely obfuscating my original intended meaning. This makes replying to
> you next to impossible*


*I have always hated the reply button because it encourages people to
include reams of quoted material that I and everybody else that is
following the thread has already read, I prefer to zero in on exactly what
it is that I'm disagreeing with. And I don't understand why you find it
impossible to reply since you are the one that wrote all the extraneous
stuff that I deleted, you must remember what you wrote. But never mind all
that, just answer me this:*

* I think I am the way that atoms behave when they are arranged in a
Johnkclarkian way. In what ways could I be wrong? *

*Science can find no way to tell the difference between one hydrogen atom
and another, so I think the only way I could be wrong would be if the
religious holy rollers turn out to be right and there is a mysterious
ineffable something called a "soul" that we could never duplicate or even
begin to understand so we shouldn't even try. And if I thought that was a
realistic possibility I'd burn all my physics books, put on some saffron
robes, and become a monk. And my current plans do not include becoming a
monk. So, what do you think? *


*By the way, I also think that information is as close as you can get to
the traditional concept of a soul and still remain loyal to the scientific
method. What do you think? *


*John K Clark*









.
>
>
>
> *but there is such a thing as an appearance of intelligence. We don't
>> believe our fellow human beings are conscious when they are sleeping or
>> under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they do not
>> have an appearance of intelligence.  *
>>
>>
>>> *> isn't a necessary part of the process, and that is what leads to the
>>> idea of a hard problem.*
>>>
>>
>> *The hardest part of the hard problem of consciousness is figuring out
>> exactly what the question is, what sort of answer would satisfy you that
>> the problem has been solved? Simply discovering that X causes consciousness
>> would not be sufficient because that would immediately generate new
>> questions like how does X manage to bridge the subjective objective divide,
>> and what causes X? It is a fact that an iterated sequence of "how" or "why"
>> questions either goes on forever or terminates in a brute fact. And I think
>> it's a brute fact that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being
>> processed intelligently. I know I've said all this before but if you show
>> me why I'm wrong I'll stop repeating it.  *
>>
>> *> The idea that you could remove consciousness from a functionally
>>> equivalent system and change nothing of its functioning, is what leads to
>>> the inherently self-contradictory idea of philosophical zombies.*
>>>
>>
>> *Philosophical zombies are not self-contradictory but if laws of physics
>> permitted the existence of such a thing in our universe then random
>> mutation and natural selection could never have been able to produce a
>> conscious entity, and yet I know for a fact that it did. Therefore I must
>> conclude that although philosophical zombies do not violate any law of
>> mathematics they must violate the laws of physics.*
>>
>>
>>> * >>Computational functionalism is certainly not claiming that
>>>> consciousness doesn't exist, it's just saying it's not needed to explain
>>>> behavior. *
>>>
>>>
>>> *> I somewhat disagree here. If a robot responsively and reliably reacts
>>> to catch a hockey puck as seen
>>> here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOIxu2lv8sI
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOIxu2lv8sI>*
>>>
>>
>> *I'm surprised you included that link because it supports my views not
>> yours. The engineers who made that robot did not need to consider the
>> nature of consciousness for one instant, and yet it was still able to play
>> a good game. If that air hockey table/robot was able to reproduce itself
>> and let loose on an empty planet and you went away and came back 4 billion
>> years later you might find it had evolved into a race of beings that was as
>> smart or smarter than human beings. *
>>
>> *> Most people don't assume any process that receives information and
>>> changes its state is conscious,*
>>>
>>
>> *Most people DO assume such a process is conscious, but only if its brain
>> is wet and squishy, not if its brain is dry and hard. Call me crazy but I
>> don't think wetness or squishiness is relevant.   *
>>
>>
>>> *> Thus they will come to reach states that are private, and ineffable.*
>>>
>>
>> *If so then pondering such states is about as useful as navel gazing. The
>> current revolution in AI happened when people stopped wasting their time
>> thinking about the nature of consciousness and started thinking about the
>> nature of intelligence. *
>>
>>
>>> *> The recurrence-necessity test*
>>>
>> [...] *The revealing test is substitution within a mind capable of
>>> comparison and report.*
>>>
>>
>> *The report is the only part of this experiment that a third-party
>> performing the experiment has access to, and Computational Functionalism
>> can reproduce that report, or any report, without making use of
>> "consciousness" or any other state that is not available to a third party.
>> And a report (a.k.a. behavior) is the only thing that Natural Selection can
>> see in the 4 billion year long experiment called "life", but natural
>> selection can't directly detect  consciousness any better than we can see
>> it in anything other than ourselves and it can't select for something it
>> can't see. Nevertheless evolution managed to produce consciousness at least
>> once, in me (and probably you too). The only way that could've happened is
>> if consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence because Natural Selection
>> can see intelligence, or at least intelligent behavior.       *
>>
>>
>>> *> that change only if some later transition also changed. Yet the
>>> unfolding preserves those transitions. A theory that makes physical
>>> recurrence constitutive must therefore posit a phenomenal change to which
>>> the subject has no epistemic access. CKT predicts no change*
>>>
>>
>> *CKT insists that in any experiment you could set up it can reproduce the
>> objective results of that experiment without resorting to any hypothetical
>> subjective state, it doesn't say there is such a state and it doesn't say
>> there isn't, it is agnostic on the issue and it only says that however
>> important it may be to us, consciousness is irrelevant as far as
>> predicting any experiment you could possibly perform. *
>>
>>
>>> *> because the center possesses and uses exactly the same distinctions
>>> before and after substitution. Repeatedly switching between the two
>>> implementations turns the case into a recurrence-specific version of
>>> dancing qualia.*
>>>
>>
>> *OK. So what? If I am not a noun but an adjective, if I am the way matter
>> behaves when it is arranged in a Johnkclarkian way then dancing qualia
>> would be exactly what I would expect to happen.   *
>>
>>
>>> *> This does not establish that LLMs are conscious.*
>>>
>>
>> *True, but I have no way of definitively establishing that you are
>> conscious and I have no way of definitively establishing that rocks are
>> not. However I could not function if I really believed I was the only
>> conscious entity in the universe therefore I must accept as an axiom of
>> existence that solipsism is untrue, and a simple corollary from that axiom
>> is consciousness must be a side effect of intelligence.   *
>>
>> *> A more targeted experiment would temporarily block communication
>>> through the corpus callosum while leaving both hemispheres active*
>>
>>
>> *Such experiments prove that a split brain produces a split mind, and
>> that's not surprising because mind is what a brain does. In looking over
>> your other proposed experiments it seems to me they all suffer from
>> problems very similar to the ones described above. They all involve the
>> experimental subject in some way "reporting" on the nature of his
>> subjective state, but the trouble is such a report, regardless of what it's
>> about, is an objective behavior that CKT can reproduce without
>> consciousness entering the picture. *
>>
>> *If you feel I've overlooked something important feel free to bring it to
>> my attention. *
>>
>> *John K Clark *
>>
>>
>
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