[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2026, 8:04 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.*
>

I am fine with you inserting a reply in-line with my written message, but
not mid-sentence, where you then misquote that sentence, and also delete
the rest of the messaiwhich made it clear my reply was saying something
very different from what the fragment and your misquote suggested. That is
all. Or if I answer a question and you delete my answer and then ask it
again or otherwise act as if I had ignored that question.


* 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? *
>

Because there is a certain sense in which atoms are irrelevant to your
behavior. A Java program can run on a PC, Mac, or Linux comouter. The exact
arrangement of its atoms are this not important to how that program
behaves. In fact you could even run it within a Game of Life simulation,
which shows even the laws of our universe that govern atoms is in a sense
totally irrelevant to that program and how it behaves.

Now if this Java program were an emulation of your brain which preserved
your consciousness, then your "John Clarkian way" inherits no properties
from your atoms. Your current instance uses them, and to implement you some
substrate is required, but they need not even be atoms -- you could be
running in a sim from a universe with very different laws that doesn't even
have atoms (like the Game of Life universe).

I use this notion of a "substitution level", inspired by Turing
universality (the ability of a general purpose computer to emulate any
other finite state machine) to derive a lower bound which must be preserved
for the high level information state of a conscious process to be
unaffected from its own point of view.

Thus, for the first time, we have a way of answering how detailed a brain
scan and mind upload program must be.


> *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. *
>

As I show above, we need not introduce souls for atoms to be irrelevant to
defining a John Clarkian way. Since you are a fan of Tegmark perhaps you
will appreciate what he says on this question:

"Computation, intelligence and consciousness are patterns in the spacetime
arrangement of particles that take on a life of their own, and it’s not the
particles but the patterns that really matter! Matter doesn’t matter."
— Max Tegmark in “Substrate-Independence” (2017)

The "life of their own" is also key.

Consider a high-level program that receives a number N and stops when it
finds the next twin prime greater than N.

Now when was ask the question: "what makes this program stop?" A physicist
may be tempted to give an answer about its circuit and charge flows and
eventually reaching a state where the electrons in the circuit stop flowing.

But as we saw, this same program could run on any of various computers, it
could even run in a world without atoms or electrons (like a game of life
universe of just cells). What determines the program behavior, and when, if
ever, it halts are the high-level machine states that deal with number
relations like primality and twin primes.

Program behavior is in a sense divorced from the behavior of atoms through
the abstract idea of a universal machine. Things can change below the level
of the machine and the program cannot notice when an identical interface is
provided underneath it.


*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? *
>

I think we don't need to assume dualism to arrive at a picture where things
can resemble dualism. The software/hardware distinction already resembles
the mind/body distinction in many respects.


> *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? *
>

For the same reasons I've given previously, I think we can do still better.
Which is to substitute "information" with "processes". The process oriented
view enables information to be "centered" relative to what is known and
what is knowable by different processes. And as I previously said, not
making this step is what leads to getting stuck on what Chalmers calls the
hard problem. At the very least, it introduces a severe hinderance to
answering it.

Jason



>
>
>
>
> .
>>
>>
>>
>> *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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