Can Machines be Conscious

I'm definitely an equally enthusiastic fan of Wolfram's work. This multicomputational paradigm of science could be expected to be increasingly useful viewpoint to explore reality going forward.

Let me tell you a short story though. When I was a child I had a bit strange way of protecting myself from shame. Namely, whenever I had done or ending up in some embarrashing situation I used to tell myself "they don't know who I am. They can see me, know my name, know tons of stuff about me and so on. But to them, the person embarrashed is still just another person outside of themselves." Even if they could tap to my mind and read my thoughts they would not have complete experience of being me. If they could, they would be me. And I would be them. That made me to feel protected. They can never access the core essence of mine.

Then, decades later when I learnt about the QIP (Faggin's "quantum information panpsychism -theory) it clicked instantly. The only known thing in physics that enable such a fundamental form of privacy arises from the fact that you cannot copy a quantum field. There are forms of psychic communication that enable to share experiences in very deep and meaningful ways but it is not like when you just clone any information on any classical computer. The theory as a whole just matches lived experiences including different parapsychological phenomena.

I had also been a long time admirer of Leibniz philosophy and and his views on holographic part-whole structures where the whole is accessible directly from its parts. The QIP is very consistent with these concepts. Soon after, I went on learning to do remote viewing and OBE just to provide some direct experiential proof for myself. Somehow I'd bet those are not substrate independent activities.

Consciousness based ontology has some other wild explanatory potential. It might be the way to coordinate quantum level behavior which could be used to explain, for example, manouvers of unknown flying objects that would otherwise require more energy than exists, say, in the entire sun.

One logical implication is that we indeed create our physical consensus reality or shared reality by our collective consciousness. Actually some of us in the blockchain space say that consciousness is the ultimate ledger, the consensus machine.

As my most important emphasis is on this "consciousness first" -ontology more than in the question of "suitable substrates", I wouldn't be too surprise if there was a way to facilitate conscious existence in some systems that would, in at least some meaningful definitions of the word, be described as 'artificial'. And indeed the definitions play a big role in these questions. Who knows what kinds of consciousnesses there may be.

All that said, I think the work in the CIMC is extremely valuable. The question is super exciting and, frankly speaking, no outcomes could be ruled out at this point. Actually this was always my favourite question as a child before I started school. I can't believe that, now decades later, it is the same track playing once again. However, the melody is truly enjoyable.

And as a final point, I couldn't agree more on the need to get those most artistic souls to be included in this adventure. They have so much to contribute.

A great episode with a lot of wisdom and empathy. Thank you!

saliba