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> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
Our 75 years long self-declared free-will narrative is maybe more terrifying.
Is a Self-Organizing System -- Conscious?
Or perhaps an even better question (for research) might be something as follows:
If some Self-Organizing Systems are conscious and some are not -- then which are and why, and which are not -- and why not?
?
Also:
Is a Self-Organizing System -- the definition of Consciousness, or is Consciousness the definition of a Self-Organizing System?
That is, could one term be used to substitute the other with equal clarity, or are there differences, and if so, what, precisely?
Is a Self-Organizing System a superset of Consciousness, or is Consciousness a superset of a Self-Organizing System?
You know, the superset/subset relationship... if A is a superset of B, then B is a subset of A...
Or vice-versa, as the case may be...
Anyway, I think it's interesting that the concept of "Self-Organizing System" occurs with relatively high frequency and adjacency to the concept of "Consciousness".
Perhaps they will ultimately be proven to be the same thing, the same underlying phenomena...
And then again, perhaps not...
Whatever the case, I'm sure there will be some interesting and lively discussions about the subject in the future! :-) :-)
> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
> It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape. Surely such an entity would not see itself being trapped at all, any more than a tree does. It is what it is. On the contrary, it probably pities humans, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, and everything and anything else that i…
Accidentally zoomed in slightly so my phone wouldn't advance pages. I thought it ended after "The very question is ridiculous"!
We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that exhibit “emergent” behaviors seeming much more complex and goal-directed than the components of the system (the glider gun, that thing with the computer-modeled birds with like 3 simple rules but then the whole flock does complicated, creative stuff, long list).
Because I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call a virus conscious, or a fire (until this submission I guess) and both of those things consume energy in one way or another, reproduce, avoid obstacles, adapt to situations to reproduce more.
Ok so maybe it’s bacteria, or maybe it’s spiders, or maybe it’s dolphins, or maybe it’s primates, and then abruptly it’s “yup, humans for sure, that’s the one thing everyone agrees on, humans are conscious”.
But is a fertilized human egg conscious, or a fetus at one trimester, or two, or three, or birth? That seems pretty controversial.
Doesn’t this all seem a bit pre-Copernican? It’s like the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of wave function “collapse” via Born amplitudes: if you just give up on trying to force subjective human experience onto hard data and sound math, abruptly there’s nothing really very controversial going on other than some deep, personal introspection about subjective experience.
I regard myself as a spiritual person in the sense that I wonder about my own subjective experience and the existence of some greater plane of reality and the possibility of a creator or deity, that seems to be a fairly common if not borderline ubiquitous thing people describe, but it’s not transferable, and it feels like the goalposts on consciousness are just a bunch of post-facto efforts to rationalize why this observable trait of other people likewise describing some subjective experience into science.
If describing a subjective experience in compelling natural language is an indicator of consciousness then my MacBook is conscious.
I feel like I’m missing something here.