[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2026, 5:51 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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. *
>

What is our universe running on?

If you say it doesn't need a computer underneath it, and there it can just
compute it's own evolution, then I can also imagine an idealized Turing
machine existing as it's own universe, powering itself. You will of course
reply saying "well then make one and earn a trillion dollars and prove me
wrong", but you're employing an ignoratio elenchi by asking for something
within this universe, rather than engaging with the point under discussion:
what computational power supports independently existing universes in the
first place?

My answer is fundamental mathematics. If you're interested in the details
of how this could be, see:
https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#The_Cause_of_Matter



>
>
>> * > 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.  *
>

Reliable structures for encoding information and and reliable transition
rules supporting universal conoutarion are needed, that is all.

Idealized billiard balls, SK combinators, lambda calculus, Diophantine
equations, Game of Life, Rule 110, are all equally capable of supporting
universal computation.



>
>> *> 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*
>

"At least in this universe" is key.
I've granted that already.



> * 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. *
>

Tell me what you think I mean when I said "if it existed primitively" as I
think we lack a common vocabulary necessary to discuss the sort of ideas I
mean to discuss.



> * > 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 gave you an example above.

* 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.  *
>

I gave you an example, Game of Life.
Could there be a universe out there in reality that just consists of some
large grid of cells whose time evolution consists of the rules of GoL? If
you say no, then why not?



>
>> *> 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.  *
>

Okay great, then we agree atoms aren't logically necessary for computation.
That was all I was saying. I was not saying you can put Nvidia out of
business with a book on Turing machines.



> *>>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? *
>

How long does a Planck time last? When you get down to it, you will see the
question is as meaningless in our universe as it is for a GoL entity to ask
how much time transpires between updates.

*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.  *
>

Now you are falling back into your "GoL running in our universe" mindset
again. It is like asking "Where does all the energy come from that powers
all the computations needex to compute our universe's own time evolution?"

Energy dissipation and energy requirements is a property of computations we
run on the sorts of computers we build within this universe. Our universe
and the hypothetical GoL universe do not themselves need energy to run
unless they are too are simulations within other universes where energy is
required to power computers.



>
>
>> *> 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".  *
>

You are answering a different question above, one of personal identity.

I am attempting to answer one of qualitative fidelity: Are the colors and
tastes your upload experiences of the same kind you enjoyed before you
uploaded?


> *> 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.  *
>


Well I made my point you see there are different levels and room for
disagreement. The upload companies will of course want to run things as
coarsely as possible to save costs. Those who upload will want as much
fidelity as possible "just in case" it's important to their preservation.
My paper suggests there are objective answers to these questions, and
proposes a method to identify them, so we don't have to make guesses.


>
>> *> **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.*
>

You are operating from your picture where we don't have a theory of
consciousness. This is what my paper provides.

* 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. *
>

Every theory in science is based on assumptions and inferences. But that
doesn't mean the assumptions and inferences can't have supporting evidence.
The theory I propose is defended using accumulated evidence.


> *> 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.  *
>

How would future uploaded you know that he still feels the same, that
coffee still tastes the same as it did pre upload?

You might propose that you would remember it tasting different, but
memories are often tied to reusing existing current neural circuitry.
People with brain damage to certain parts of their visual cortex not only
lose the ability to see color, they lose the ability to remember, imagine
and dream in color.

If you say: "so long as I don't notice enough to complain, I'm fine" well
that's great, you don't need to wait for a theory like mine. We use the no
complaints criterion. But what happens 6 months later when your unloaded
self finally does notice something to complain about?



>
> * >> 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.  *
>

Everett's many worlds doesn't get you different physical laws. And so you
can't use it to explain fine tuning.



>
> >* 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. *
>

Its still a surprise if there's only one set of laws. The coincidence would
be between the "coincidings" of

1. The one set of laws that happens to exist.
with
2. The small fraction of possible laws that permit life to exist.

That's the definition of a coincidence. Two things happening together in an
improbable way. Drawing a card from a deck and it being a 2 of spades is
not an unlikely coincidence. But if I asked you to guess a card, and you
guessed 2 of spades, and then I happened to draw it from a randomly
shuffled deck, that would be a coincidence whose likelihood was 1 in 52.

Drawing the card without a guess does not carry these odds because it
depends on the description of the event: "I drew any card" (1 in 1), I
would draw a spade (1 in 4), etc.

If you play the lottery once and win the first time you play. That is
surprising coincidence, even if it only happened once.

Your attempt to eliminate the improbability by saying "if it weren't
anthropic, we wouldn't be here" doesn't work. As we could also imagine rare
coincidences involving barren universes.

Let's say only one universe existed, and it had no life in it, but it's
fine-strucure constant happened to be:
0.123456789101112131415161718192021... to 120 decimal places.

Surely we in some hypothetical view from no where could remark at surprise
that it is weird this one universe that happens to exist has this rare
coincidence that it's fine-structure constant happens to follow this
pattern of digits for as far as it does.

Whether such a universe bears life or not has nothing to do with it being a
rare coincidence.

Jason

P.S. I think we agree on the rest below.


> *> 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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