alt Hacker NewsYeah, agreed. The actual real riddle is consciousness. Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and energy zap into existence something that actually (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.
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morpheos137 • yesterday at 4:21 PM
There is no objective evidence consciousness exists as distinct from an information process.
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I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious:
(1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input.
(2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment.
(3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally extended self-model.
(4) It uses these models with self-derived agency to generate and evaluate counterfactuals: Predictions of alternative futures under alternative actions. (i.e. a general predictive function.)
(5) It has control channels through which those evaluations shape its future trajectories in ways that are not trivially reducible to a fixed reflex table.
This would also indicate that Boltzmann Brains are not conscious -- so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains, which would otherwise be very surprising -- and that P-Zombies are impossible by definition. I've been working on a book about this for the past three years...