Comment by root_axis
14 hours ago
Based on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.
14 hours ago
Based on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.
I'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
Actually I don't really have any problems with panpsychism. It's a pretty uncommon perspective, but when discussing conscious machines, it at least presents a consistent criteria for consciousness.
I do not know, because we have no known way of measuring consciousness.
I merely object to the notion that we know how to tell who or what has a consciousness.