A thermostat perceives the temperature and acts on it. Is it conscious?
Registering does not equal perceiving. I mean subjective experience.
We think we know what consciousness is.
Actually, I'm quite aware that I don't. I find consciousness to be the
greatest puzzle in the universe, but in our frustration to solve it, we
often state that it does not exist, even though it is contradictory to every
moment of your life you experience. Humans trying to understand
consciousness are like bacteria trying to understand humanity.
I've long given up on fathoming the nature of consciousness, so I'll not
speculate. If it is bound to matter, we life for only a very short time, and
if it is bound to patterns, it is something which appears to transcend
physical laws, as it could "travel" at infinite speed.
An interesting thought experiment: if the universe is infinite, according to
a ballpark estimate there would be an exact copy of you at a distance of
10^(10^29) m: because of the Bekenstein bound of the information of matter,
there are only a limited (though inconceivably large) number of
configurations your energy can have, so that you can, in principle, have an
exact duplicate. In fact, according to the ergodic hypothesis
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_hypothesis), in a universe of infinite
volume there would be an infinite number of such exact copies. What would
happen if you'd die? Would you just live on in one of those copies, as if
uploaded? If so, which one? Is this merely stochastic? What would this
depend on? If consciousness is nothing else than patterns, then the
"selection" of this copy is purely random, and therefore acausal.
One thing I'm almost certain: while we can't know what consciousness is, we
can know that it is. And though each of us has no proof of others'
consciousness, we each have proof of our own consciousness.
When logic conflicts with instinct, instinct wins and the logic gets
contorted. The heated discussion on the copy paradox is a perfect example.
Your consciousness is tranferred to the copy only if the original is
destroyed, or destroyed in certain ways, or under certain conditions. We
discuss this ad-infinitum, but it always leads to a contradiction because
we
refuse to accept that consciousness does not exist, because if you accept
it
you die. So the best you can do is accept both contradictory beliefs and
leave it at that.
We don't accept it because we are conscious ourselves every moment. We can't
remember if we were conscious just the moment before the present, but we can
know that we are conscious at the present itself, infinitesimal as it is. If
we have no consciousness, why do I experience what I perceive, rather than
what you perceive?
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