Sy Borg wrote: ↑March 12th, 2022, 7:04 pm
GrayArea wrote: ↑March 12th, 2022, 6:34 am2) I think consciousness is more than something that can be digitised. I believe that it would be easier to base Man-made, Artificial Consciousness on more tangible things such as chemistry and biology, because I believe that tangibility is one of the key features of the physical building blocks of consciousness. However, I will not exclude the possibility that some certain aspects or functions that lead to consciousness could be digitised. Somewhere tangibility does not matter.
If we were in a general thread about humanity's prospects or a cafe I'd engage on all three points but this is a thread on consciousness, so I'd best focus on that for now.
I used to think that consciousness required "wetware" - basically the biochem you referred to above. However, someone years ago (forgot whom) pointed out that electricity flows in much the same way as water. If life depends on the complexity and flexibility of fluid dynamics (which I suspect) then electricity should be able to replicate that, given that electricity behaves like a fluid. The technical challenges would be huge, given that both the human brain's capacity and the whole internet can be measures in petabytes.
If such a consciousness emerged it would be derived from human consciousness but would have to be immensely different in some respects, just as animal minds vary due to different morphology.
Life primarily depending on the complexity of
fluid dynamics is an interesting idea and one I have not heard of so far. However, I still think differently. I think that life depends more on the cell-like building blocks of a conscious medium, being able to create its own, self-sustaining system that sort of "translates" what happens on the outside of the system to their own digestible information using what they are made out of, and using its inner functions. Basically replicating the outside world using their own selves, and then as a result being able to control its whole collective self.
Cells follow the laws of physics, as all existing objects do. I believe that if the building blocks of the conscious medium are more accepting of more parts of what happens in the outside world (=more detailed parts of the laws of physics), then they can, in more complex ways, "translate" what happens on the outside—thus a more intricate and higher level of consciousness. Electrons are very accepting of a lot of parts of the laws of physics as they are fundamental particles which make up almost everything that follows laws of physics, but using only electrons to build up these so-called “cell-like building blocks" would be pretty ineffective, since one would need many other functions that interrelate.
Adding on, the inner function of the cell-like building blocks also contribute to the intricacy of the translation of the outside events, because these building blocks must not only translate the outside materials, but also the interactions they have with the outside events/laws of physics in order to fully translate the world.
That's to say, the more causally interrelated each materials that
create the functions are, the better! Like compounds of chemicals and biological matter found in cells. These cells that are necessary for life will be at their fullest capable state if they are made out of complex and compound materials that are inherently more causally interrelated to each other than electrons, where they cause each other to create more inner actions and inner functions( = expanded method of "translating" the world which leads to a more detailed consciousness), as a result of being more interrelated.
