[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[John Clark]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2026 at 10:49 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

* >> 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.*
>

*Yes but that's because a PC and a Mac and a Linux computer are all made of
atoms and are logically equivalent to a Turing Machine, and a Turing
Machine's tape must also be made of atoms as does its read/write head.   *


> *> The exact arrangement of its atoms are this not important to how that
> program behaves.*
>

*If the arrangement of atoms is just a random jumble and its behavior
cannot be logically reduced to that of a Turing machine then the program
cannot run at all. To make a Turing Machine you could use any sort of
atoms, but you can't use just any arrangement of them. It's not easy to
make a fast efficient Turing Machine, that's why you can't use the hand
tools in your garage to make something that can compute as well as what
comes out of TSMC's factories in Taiwan. *

*>  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.*
>

*The atoms need to have one very important property, the property of
existence, however atoms are generic but the information necessary to
emulate me is not, in fact currently there is only one chunk of matter in
the entire observable universe that is arranged in a Johnkclarkian in way,
but once Drexler style nanotechnology becomes available that situation
could change. *


> *> Your current instance uses them, and to implement you some substrate is
> required,*
>

*I agree but fundamentally it doesn't matter which substrate you use.
That's why 2+2 =4 regardless of if the calculation is made by a mechanical
calculator, a vacuum tube computer, a modern computer, or a human brain.  *


> *> 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*
>

*Nobody knows for certain but maybe, however **even if it's true somewhere
down the line you're still going to need something physical to make a
calculation. Mathematics is the language of physics but no language by
itself, not even the language of mathematics, can produce a calculation any
more than the English language word "cow" can produce milk. That's why I
think physics is more fundamental than mathematics.*


> *> (like the Game of Life universe).*
>

*It's impossible to play Conway's Game of Life without using something
physical, like a computer or a human brain, that is capable of making a
calculation.  *

*> 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.*
>

*I don't quite understand what you mean by that.  But speaking of upper
bounds, we know the upper bound of how much information would be required
to construct a human brain at the time of birth, and it's not very large.
DNA also places an upper bound on how complex a seed AI would have to be.
In the entire human genome there are only 3 billion base pairs. There are 4
bases, so each base can represent 2 bits, there are 8 bits per byte, so
that comes out to 750 meg. Just 750 megabytes, that's about the same amount
of information as an old CD disk could hold when they first came out 40
years ago. And because of redundancy a lossless data compression
algorithm could shrink that down to 500 megabytes or less. And that's for
an entire human baby not just the brain. *

*And if you're talking about describing one person's genome relative to a
human reference genome, that is to say the amount of information you'd need
to change one person's genome into another persons genome, you need less
than 10 megabytes for that. *


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

*And what number did you come up with?  When I take a sip of coffee I am
changed, is that change large enough that I become a different person? *

*> 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."*
>

*I am a fan but I don't agree with Tegmark about everything, however I
agree with him about that, it’s not the particles but the patterns that
really matter, that's because matter is generic but patterns are not. **Tegmark
is a well known Many Worlds advocate and I thinks it's the least bad
quantum interpretation anybody has so far come up with. He** thinks
everything that does not violate the laws of physics actually happens, and
he's probably right about that too. But Tegmark goes further, he thinks
everything that does not violate the laws of logic or mathematics happen,
and I'm much more skeptical about that. In one of his books he listed 4
different types of multiverses: *

*Level I — Our universe, beyond our cosmic horizon*

*Level II — Different bubble universes*

*Level III — Many-Worlds quantum mechanics*

*Level IV — The mathematical universe*

*I have no problem with the first three but I think Tegmark goes one
multiverse too far because Level IV is "every mathematically structure
corresponds to a physically existing universe", and I think that's probably
not true. Mathematics is the language of physics but a language can be used
to write both fiction and nonfiction, and I have a hunch that some of the
more abstruse areas of modern mathematics are the equivalent to
mathematical Harry Potter novels. *

*> 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?"*
>

*If it does stop then it will be because of information, but that is a big
"if". Assuming N is the largest known twin prime we don't know if that
program will ever stop, it might but it could be that the number of twin
primes is finite and N is the largest one. However Gödel told us that a
proof of that might not exist, and Turing told us that in general there is
no way to determine if a question is answerable or not; so we could be
grinding through huge numbers forever looking for the next twin prime but
always failing because a larger twin prime does not exist. *

*> Program behavior is in a sense divorced from the behavior of atoms*
>

*It is divorce from the behavior of any particular group of atoms, but not
of atoms in general. *

*>> 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.*
>

*Actually I sort of believe in dualism because I think there is a
difference between a noun and an adjective, and I don't think I am a noun I
think I am an adjective.  *

> *I think we can do still better. Which is to substitute "information"
> with "processes".*
>

*A process is a specific series of actions, and you can't have that without
information. *

*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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