The question "does X have subjective experiences" could be addressed by a theory of consciousness. Such theory should be able to tell what physical systems, and to what extent, are conscious. Interestingly, attempts of such theory already exist: Integrated information theory is a good example.
What is it like to be a smartphone?
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Re: What is it like to be a smartphone?
#22Do smartphones "die" when they run out of battery or is that merely "sleep" for them? RAM needs power, but ROM is preserved so ... amnesia? Comma? I'm never letting my phone battery drain again.
Because we built the phone, we know what is the "state" of the phone and any information in volatile storage can be persisted in non-volatile storage.
I can't think of any biological analogy for that. If/when there is a mechanism to save and restore the state of a human mind, we will have to add more nuance to how we talk about dying.
Re: What is it like to be a smartphone?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when you die, your DNA can still be sequenced.
DNA is generally non-mutable, so that's more akin to the (read-only) /system partition on androids. There's still the /data partition which is mutable and gets saved even after you power down.
In that conceptual framework it seems life doesn't have non volatile storage at all, so it seems a bit of a non sequitur to use it in an analogy with computing systems.
The closest I can come up with using that framework is plasmids. But if you squirreled away the plasmids of a plasma before ceasing all of it's operations, then injected those plasmids into a new copy of the bacterium, you'd still say that the original bacterium died.
Re: What is it like to be a smartphone?
#24"We are, however, able to see that, excepting the simplest of life forms, an animal has a consciousness" What does the word "consciousness" mean in that sentence, and why are the simplest of life forms excluded? What test do we apply that all organisms pass, except for the simplest life forms, which fail?
Gut feelings, obviously.
Re: What is it like to be a smartphone?
#25The question "does X have subjective experiences" could be addressed by a theory of consciousness. Such theory should be able to tell what physical systems, and to what extent, are conscious. Interestingly, attempts of such theory already exist: Integrated information theory is a good example.
Also Panpsychism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
The problem with these definitions is that they require wide-spread agreement to be considered valid explanations.
Re: What is it like to be a smartphone?
#26What is it like to be the Internet? That structure resembles our brain: a reactive, resilient, shifting network of connections among billions of individual human brains using smartphones and other technological devices, storing, aggregating and routing information in complex and arbitrary ways. If consciousness is to be found in our technology, I wouldn't look at the individual smartphone, but at the network of all s…
Could society be a body, the internet its nerves and the economy its blood?
You've got to put people in there somewhere.
Re: What is it like to be a smartphone?
#27Do smartphones "die" when they run out of battery or is that merely "sleep" for them? RAM needs power, but ROM is preserved so ... amnesia? Comma? I'm never letting my phone battery drain again.
I'd say they die. There's not really a better analog in biology. Even in the case of sexual reproduction, the new life carries tons of epigenetic state across the creation boundary, and is more akin to fork(2) than exec(2). A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me.
What you're illustrating here is that "awake", "asleep", "death", and "life", are pretty terrible metaphors for states our computers exist in.
Saying my laptop is "asleep" when it's suspended is verbally cromulent, no one would be confused by what I meant. But the metaphor breaks down badly on any attempt to extend it.
Even if I brick it, I have the option to purchase fresh equipment and restore from the most recent backup. If my timing is good, there may be no difference from my perspective.
This isn't possible with living things, and it might not even be possible, the fond dreams of mind-upload enthusiasts notwithstanding.
Re: What is it like to be a smartphone?
#28Re: What is it like to be a smartphone?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of the question: did we domesticate wheat, or did wheat domesticate us? Did we domesticate cats, or did cats domesticate us? Thus is the nature of the feedback loop.
I studied dogs quite a bit (informal academia (course audits, etc)), and I firmly believe they domesticated us instead of the other way around.
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