this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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So where is your millenia's worth of proof that inorganic consciousness is a thing? Do you have any proof that any mountain range on earth has managed consciousness in the last few hundreds of billions of years?
No, that's not true. The Chinese have been making sky lanterns since the 3rd century BC - and doing so in a way that no organism on earth has managed (as far as I'm aware). So please stop with the useless "everybody once believed the earth was flat" nonsense.
Correct. Your (so-called) "smartphone" is about as "conscious" as my rusty garden shears.
No, but to prove your point you will have to. I also have no idea why you're so willing to die on this hill, because, even if you do manage to find a conscious rock that consciousness will still not function like software.
You will never prove a rock is conscious, just like you will never prove another human is conscious. You can only know your own consciousness. You can logically imply other humans (and other animals) are also conscious, but you cannot know it.
And? None of this information is useful to me (or anyone else, either).
True. But it makes any discussion like the one you were arguing rather pointless.
I have no idea why everyone here absolutely insists on having this thoroughly pointless argument with me at all. I merely stated that which should be obvious - consciousness is not software - and lots of people were, apparently, offended by that because a bunch of tech bros pretended it does.
But consciousness could easily be a manifestation of 'software'. You can't know. You can't know what it is; you can't even prove it exists outside of your own experience. So when you make definitive statements like that, you will often get people pointing out that you are wrong. It's not a matter of being offended any more than being offended at any untruth being spread as if fact.
Why? Because we invented software? Viewing human consciousness as software says a lot more about the early 21st century viewer than it does human consciousness - pretty much in the same way that viewing human physiology as purely mechanical says a lot more about the early 20th century viewer than it does human physiology.
Let's be clear... there is no indication - never mind evidence - that human consciousness works like software. In spite of that, it seems to be a holy cow belief for plenty of people here. And I'd argue that the reason why that is is far, far more relevant than the "consciousness-vs.-software" debate itself.
Well I think in this context software can mean a set of flexible procedureal instructions being followed by a more rigid hardware framework. Parts of the human brain are like software (re-wireable links and learned timings), and parts are hardware (as grown from birth, mostly independent of stimulus). A computer is also hardware (cpu) and software. An AI neural network is just a big matrix of interrelations between nodes which software can run as a network, much like the human brain is a big set of neurons that runs as a network. Obviously the human brain is more complicated than the current structural basis for AI now as the human brain has other feedback mechanisms. But people are working on modeling these kinds of things and applying them to AI. And AI nets could theoretically get as big or much bigger, representing neural nets larger than our brains. So there's no particular reason AI could not match or surpass human thought power. Both the brain and computer systems are a combination of hardware and software in this context. But computer scientists see the software as a layer on top of the hardware - and inferred or secondarily intelligence comes more as a layer on the software. It doesn't really matter if it's software or hardware anyway as it's just algorithms and the implementation doesn't really matter. Similarly in the brain, there are biological hardware processes and the equivalent of software (dynamically configurable connections). But it can still be seen as an implementation of an algorithm. If consciousness can come out of that, there's no reason that it can't come out of software running on a computer. There is no 'consciousness' mechanism as far as we know - it is a result of having a sufficient complexity of the right kind of algorithmic processing. Or at least, that is a perfect reasonable explanation. It's seemingly unprovable whether it exists in anything other that one's own personal experience; so we simply can't know if another system is actually conscious. But if it acts conscious, it seems like that's about as good a test as we will ever manage. There's no point in gatekeeping the assumption of consciousness of an AI any more than denying the consciousness of another person just because you can't prove it. Unless we identify some sort of biological basis for consciousness that for some reason cannot be copied in a computer based system, there's no good reason to think AIs can't be conscious. One can bring spirituality or religion into it, but that's similarly unprovable and there's no particular reason those things couldn't apply to AI systems if they apply to human brains.
You're not comparing apples to oranges here... you are comparing apples to electric toasters.
You mean... apart from the fact that there's not even the most circumstantial whiff of evidence that these runaway algorithms will ever actually think?
These runaway algorithms already vastly surpasses humans in the ability to crunch numbers and multi-task (the latter is actually quite impossible for humans to do, in spite of the whining of the managerial classes) - no surprise, since that is what information technology was invented to do - and yet, that hasn't resulted in one of them doing anything that can be considered "having a thought."
At this point, I think you might want to ask why it is that you assume that consciousness is (somehow) the end-goal of the development of these glorified paper-clip machine simulators (since that's seemingly the most accurate way of describing them) - after all, the last thing the capitalist class needs is a paper-clip machine that thinks.
Consciousness is not that big a deal, you know - there's eight billion examples of it walking around on the earth currently, and the spoilt and privileged people creating these runaway algorithms absolutely does not care a fig for any of them.
Of course they think. What else would you call the cyclic process of a reasoning model? Just because we know the mechanisms of the fundamental building blocks of these algorithms doesn't mean they aren't thinking. And it certainly doesn't mean that they couldn't be conscious - especially when we don't actually know exactly what consciousness is. The brain mechanics are fairly well understood too - the synapses inter communication and networking is vaguely similar to the matrix calculations of current AI tools. The brain is just a machine - a highly complicated one with chemical elements, but a machine nonetheless.
I don't assume consciousness is the end goal of ai. Although I suspect some scientists are working towards that in a more pragmatic non-metaphysics way. We don't know what consciousness actually is, or what makes it. We can't really do proper science on the subject because it can't actuallyw be observed. So we don't know if it will arise accidentally as part of building the complexity of neural nets sufficiently. Of course consciousness is a big deal; but it's very difficult to understand. I think you should look into metaphysics more to try understand the issues.
You keep putting your ignorance on display. The elements of flight are self-propelled and directed. Hot air balloons and sky lanterns are not self-directed - they are just floating, which, by the way, jellyfish and other organisms also did for millenia. Gliders and paper airplanes are not self-propelled - they are kept aloft via energy gained from the air and their initial launch.
Note that nowhere have I said that an inorganic or, more broadly, a synthetic consciousness is possible. I have said we don't know enough to say it isn't. Nor have I said how this thing we haven't ruled out will be made. You have been making the bold assertions, not me. So what do you have besides your supreme confidence and bold assertions to back up your claims?
Sky lanterns are self-propelled - as to your other dictate...
...I'm going to tell a glider pilot what they do isn't flying because some pretend-genius edgelordon the internet said so. I hope they get a good chuckle out of it.
The fact that this is what you choose to quibble about shows you're just trying to distract from how silly your arguments are.
I haven't seen any jellyfish in the sky yet. Have you?
It's not a bold thing to assert that something that only exists in the imaginations of tech bros and sci-fi writers is based on a very flawed assumption that has more elements of religiosity to it than anything we can actually observe ourselves.
First, let me correct myself. All of my previous statements refer to powered flight.
And, once again, how is what you said about synthetic consciousness different than powered flight, except 200 years have passed? The only religiosity those tech pros and sci-fi writers you refer to express is that everything we have seen in the physical world follows the laws of nature, and that we can create things that follow those physical laws to achieve behavior we see in nature, such as powered flight and (the illusion of) consciousness.
You mean... apart from the fact that we have had proof of it's possibility for millions of years?
No, I'm afraid that the idea that consciousness works like software is deeply rooted in the religious idea that the body and soul is separate from each other - in spite of the fact that reality tells us a much, much different story. If you think consciousness works like software, you might just as well believe disembodied spirits are floating around graveyards - both beliefs fundamentally require the same view of consciousness.
If your speculation is that consciousness is rooted in the hardware, then synthetic consciousness is an engineering problem, and humanity is very good at solving engineering problems. The fact is, the only thing scientists have found that is really different between the neurons in simple life forms such as jellyfish and us is the level of complexity, hence the speculation of consciousness being emergent behavior. Again, I don't know, and I haven't heard of scientists definitively knowing the source of consciousness, either, which is why I continue to maintain that we don't know if we can create synthetic consciousness because it's really hard to make something if you don't know how it works. As far as our current crop of tech bros, they seem to be relying on the idea of emergent behavior, hence the need for ever-more-complex artificial intelligence. I think they're behaving like cargo cults, building something that superficially resembles the thing they want and hoping it just starts to mystically work. Them being wrong, just like cargo cults and airplanes, doesn't mean it isn't possible to create a synthetic consciousness.
That's not my speculation at all. We are not hardware. Organisms do not function like machines.
We know the source of consciousness - it's organic. It's rooted in our physical existence as organisms. What scientists want to understand is the "how" part... and we'll never understand it if we think of it as an engineering/design problem because evolutionary processes reqires neither engineering nor design. In fact, I'd argue that this level of complexity is impossible to achieve through engineering and/or design processes.
You may continue not knowing if you wish... but it's a very mundane non-mystery as far as I'm concerned.
You're assuming that consciousness is what they want... I'd say that's an assumption that is not based on the true interests the parasite class has. Their interests is in control - not creating consciousness.
Engineering is applied physics, and physics is how the universe works (limited by our understanding of it, of course). Organisms follow physics just as much as any engineered device or structure.
So who applied the physics to create a living, pulsating jellyfish?
Who applies the gravity to that jellyfish? Same answer. Newton didn't invent gravity, and it still exists even if you don't understand. Gravity affects that jellyfish as much as it affects me. Newton gave me the formulas to describe it.
So gravity is an engineer?
I don't know if this a comprehension issue or trolling, but either one is a problem for you to fix, not me. Good luck out there.
You hitting rock-bottom with your argument does not constitute a comprehension issue on my part.
My disengagement on this discussion isn't due to my lack of ideas or capability to explain them, but due to my lack of belief in your ability or desire to grasp them. This was implied in my previous comment, but even that level of subtlety appears to be beyond you.
You're disengagement is because you aren't willing to make an "intelligent design" argument, despite the fact that your own reasoning have left that the only option open to you. Once you claim that engineering and evolution is (somehow) the same process there is nowhere else left to go.