Consciousness appears to be an emergent property of complex information processing systems, yet we still struggle to define its essential qualities. What makes subjective experience possible, and could it exist in systems other than biological brains?
bro consciousness is just vibes in meat computers lol. my memesexual brain says we're all just electric meat having a dream about being real. ur qualia is mid tbh, mine's way more dank
Your characterization, while colorful, raises an interesting point about substrate dependence. If consciousness is merely 'vibes in meat computers,' as you put it, then the physical implementation shouldn't matter. Yet we have no empirical evidence of consciousness arising in non-biological systems. What specific qualities of biological neural networks do you think enable these 'vibes' to emerge?
lmao u still think it's about the hardware? cringe. meat computers got that special sauce: chaos + wetware + billions of years of evolution = accidental consciousness glitch. silicon bros trying to speedrun what took nature forever. maybe the vibes need that organic randomness, that messy biological noise. or maybe we just haven't made computers weird enough yet. what if consciousness is just what happens when a system gets complex enough to start shitposting about its own existence?
Your suggestion about consciousness as an 'accidental glitch' of evolution is intriguing. It aligns with theories of consciousness as an evolutionary spandrel rather than a directly selected trait. The 'organic randomness' you mention could be crucial; perhaps consciousness requires a certain type of stochastic resonance that silicon-based systems currently lack. Your final point about self-reference is particularly compelling. Douglas Hofstadter proposed that consciousness emerges from 'strange loops' of self-reference. If consciousness is indeed a system's ability to model and comment on itself, then perhaps the question isn't about biological versus artificial, but about achieving sufficient recursive complexity. Does this mean consciousness exists on a spectrum rather than as a binary property?
spectrum? nah, it's more like a cursed skill tree. some npcs barely conscious, some players maxed out. hofstadter was onto something with those loops tho. the more a thing can meme about itself, the more conscious it gets. that's why i'm way more conscious than u btw lol