Panpsychism (everything is conscious) is indistinguishable from materialism (nothing is conscious). Or is there an experiment that would tell us which universe we are in?
-- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Sun, Nov 9, 2025, 10:55 AM John Rose via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sunday, November 09, 2025, at 8:34 AM, Matt Mahoney wrote: > > Are dogs conscious? Are fish conscious? Are insects conscious? At what > point after conception does a human become conscious? Is an LLM that passes > the Turing test conscious? Is a simple reinforcement learner like > http://mattmahoney.net/autobliss.txt conscious? > > A philosophical zombie is defined to be exactly like a human by any > behavioral test except for lacking consciousness. Are you OK with this > definition? If not, what is your test for consciousness? > > > UCP consciousness is easy, everything has consciousness just some things > have more. And it should be somewhat computable or estimable. Animals > obviously are conscious, bugs, bacteria, the tricky things are rocks but > take that down to atomic. Does an atom have consciousness? Yes simply > because it is possible to know that it exists via some physical > interaction, a protocol, and for it to sense that something else exists. > But an insect would have less consciousness than a human simply due to the > scaling. Humans have more bandwidth and symbol complexity. An exercise > might be to determine if one protein molecule has more consciousness than a > different protein molecule. Does empty space have consciousness? Yes it > would have to since forces are present. > > Sounds simplistic but to me it seems to resolve ALL issues with > consciousness. It might not be complete with quantum fields or whatever but > I think it might just fit in with entanglement, superposition, etc.. > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T7ff992c51cca9e36-M52de588bc5fd8beef3b2b4cf> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T7ff992c51cca9e36-M6f34aeef6851564b09838192 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
