[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[John Clark]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 2:26 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*>> 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.   *
>>
>
> *> Turing's specification was abstract and mathematical.*
>

*Yes, exactly.  It's abstract and mathematical and that is NOT enough to
perform a calculation, if it were TSMC's factories in Taiwan would be
printing out copies of Alan Turing's 1936 paper instead of manufacturing
high-tech microchips. *



> * > Atoms aren't strictly necessary.*
>

*Atoms (or at least some sort of stable physical structure capable of
encoding information and interacting with other information in a consistent
way)** is strictly necessary if you want to make a Turing Machine, and thus
be able to generate intelligence, and thus be able to generate
consciousness.  *


> *> No features of turing's machine depends on any specific properties of
> atoms, *
>


*Actually it does. A printed copy of Turing's paper is NOt a Turing
Machine, it's just a bunch of squiggles on paper, to actually make
something equivalent to a Turing Machine a mind would have to read that
paper, and mind is what a brain does, and at least in this universe a brain
must be made of atoms, it doesn't seem possible that a brain could be made
of something more fundamental like quarks. Unlike Nanotechnology, for
Picotechnology to work we'd need new science, not just better engineering. *

> *>> 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. *
>>
>
> *> It sounds like you agree with my point that you can have two
> arrangements of atoms, computer X and computer Y, and both could run the
> same program, despite being in different material arrangements,*
>

*Yes. It doesn't matter if the brain is soft and squishy or hard and dry,
2+2 still equals 4. *


> *> Would a "game of life universe" count as physical if it existed
> primitively?*
>

*The Game Of Life couldn't exist primitively because for a pattern of cells
to evolve something physical must change whenever a cell in that cellular
automation, or ANY Cellular automation,  switches from on to off or vice
versa. *

* > How simple can a physical universe be?*
>

*The lower limit would be non-existentce. But I think what you really wanna
know is how simple a physical universe can be that still allows
intelligence to operate and therefore consciousness. I can't give you an
exact figure but it certainly wouldn't need to be as complex as our
universe is for a Turing Machine to be able to operate, but perhaps the
extra complexity is needed before Darwinian Evolution is possible.   *


> *> How do you define "physical" or "physical existence"?*
>

*As I keep saying, examples are far more fundamental and more important
than definitions.  *


> *> You say something "physical" is needed at the bottom, but if this
> universe can exist primitively why can't any other structure also exist
> primitively?*
>

*There might be other universes that don't have atoms and have radically
different laws of physics than we do but still have intelligence and
consciousness in them because they have structures of some sort of a form
we can't begin to imagine that can store and manipulate information in the
way a Turing Machine can.  *

*>>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.  *
>>
>
> *> Here I am talking about a primitively existing universe whose laws are
> identical to what we call Conway's game of life.*
>

*You need 3 dimensions for the Game Of Life, 2 for space and 1 for time. In
a Conway universe fundamental physics would be much simpler then what we
have, they'd teach it in kindergarten, but biology would be far more
complicated. And there are questions, how long would it take for a cell to
change from on to off? If it's instantaneous and something equivalent to
energy is not needed for things to change then infinite, and not just
astronomically large, computations would be possible. And I think that
might produce some logical paradoxes.  *



> *> What I am asking is: how much detail must a scan of your brain preserve
> to implement your same consciousness?*
>

*I don't think it's an all or nothing matter. Am I the same consciousness
as I was when I was five? I can remember some incidents from back then
(with questionable accuracy) but about how I felt emotionally about them at
the time  I can only give them crude imprecise labels like "happy" or
"sad".  *

*> Some say we just need high level software/algorithms implemented by
> brain regions, the exact circuits in the cortical columns don't matter.*
>

*I don't think there are many who say that.  *


*> Others might say we need to replicate the brain down to the level of the
> spiking neural network.*
>

*That sounds more reasonable, although I don't think it needs to be
perfect, certainly you don't have to worry about quantum states or anything
like that.  *

*> Others say we need to model the cell biology of each neuron and perhaps
> the glial cells as well.*
>

*That would be vast overkill. Most of the things that a neuron does is just
generic maintenance and metabolism that every cell in the body, not just
those in the brain, needs to do in order to stay alive, it has nothing to
do with the information processing that is responsible for intelligence and
consciousness.   *

*> Still others believe we need a full proteum and molecular simulation.*
>

*That's just silly.  *


> *> **By considering the conscious state as a computational process, we
> can make a similar determination of what facts are able to enter and
> influence that conscious state.*
>

*No, that would not be possible. We can use the scientific method to
determine how brain states correlate with behavior, but not with
consciousness. Before you could perform such an experiment you'd need to
assume what you're trying to prove, you need to assume that behavior (in
the form of speech or writing) correlates with consciousness. *

*> and this sets a minimum level of detail that a brain scan must capture
> and that a brain emulation must emulate to preserve the same character of
> consciousness. Failing this might still yield a conscious entity that is
> similar to John Clark, but your experiences, say in how you process sound
> or vision or how emotions feel to you, could be off in subtle ways.*
>

*If it's subtle enough I don't care, every time I take a sip of coffee I am
altered in subtle ways, but I still feel like I'm me and that's the
important thing.  *


* >> 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. *
>>
>
> *> Genomes are small, but connectomes are about 10 million times larger.*
>


*A Human brain has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections, the
most advanced AI models today have about 10 trillion weights (parameters)
and they're rapidly getting larger. And s signals in a human brain on
average travel about 30 meters a second, in a computer they travel at
300,000,000 **meters a second.*

*> And proteomes larger still.*
>

*Irrelevant.  *


*> How detailed of a simulation of your brain is required if we want to
> faithfully reproduce the state your brain enters when it sips a cup of
> coffee?*
>

*If what you're interested in is preserving personal identity, and it is in
my case, then faithfully reproducing the state of my brain when I sip a cup
of coffee is not necessary. *


*>> I am a fan but I don't agree with Tegmark about everything, however I
>> agree with him 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.*
>>
>
> *> Do you think there are at least a large number of universes with
> different laws?*
>


*Yes. I think **Everett's Many Worlds** is probably correct (or at least
less wrong than other quantum interpretations). It says that everything
that is not forbidden by Schrodinger's Equation actually exists, and if
that's true then there are an astronomical, and possibly an infinite,
number of other universes.  *


>* how** do you explain the fine tuning coincidences?*
>

*However rare universes that allow for the existence of intelligent life
may be, it's not a coincidence or a surprise that we happen to be in one of
them. *

*> We can explain the trend towards lawful universes under various
> selection rules, for example using Kolmogorov complexity, we expect the
> description of most universes to be describable by short programs, and this
> tends to produce universes with stable laws, rather than universes with
> surprising magical deviations from laws as in Harry Potter.*
>

*I agree with that.  *



> *>>> 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. *
>>
>
> *> Then you see the power of rules that emerge above and beyond the mere
> low level physical laws. *
>

*There may be no reason why every even number greater than 2 is the sum of
two primes, it's just a brute fact; if so then we will never find a proof
that it's true and we will never find a counterexample to prove it's
false.  *



> *> The emergent properties of complex systems can have their own rules and
> causal effects in our world. It is in this sense that minds can cause
> things even if you ignore their high level states and focus your attention
> on the atoms only,*
>

*Yeah, but that's true for any complex system, not just minds. There is a
high-level  and a low-level description of pressure and fluid flow, the
most useful one depends on the specific problem that you're trying to
solve. *

*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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