this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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Please don't write off the possibility of artificial consciousness, just because this isn't it. Thought is a process which meat can perform.
The meat does the thinking.
Stopped what I was doing to watch this again.
I mean, sure consciousness is (probably) a physical process, so like any other process we should be able to replicate it with some sort of machine.
...but I really really really doubt that machine is going to be a plain old Turing machine.
Every machine is a plain old Turing machine.
Even quantum computing is just a shortcut for a subset of hideous obscure proofs. They aren't doing different math. Special pleading is a fallacy... except when I do it, that's different.
I don't quite think my lawnmower is boolean complete.
And while quantum computing may be expressible algorithmically (dunno, your claim, not mine), that doesn't mean all of quantum physics is.
Quantum computing features wave functions, so it's more similar to human brains than binary is. I have this headcanon SciFi thing like what if the first full scale quantum computer we make accidentally conscious? That would be cool. Though, seeing how badly we fucked up much simpler LLMs implementation maybe not so cool…
We've yet to be able to replicate it from the old parts of meat we know are involved in it with the addition of electricity in the ways it should need in even the much simpler flesh of insects, amphibians, and reptiles. Best we can do is make a muscle twitch without causing observable thought/emergent nureaul processes.
So even if we can, we're so far from it that thinking we're on the cusp seems delusional to me.
Edit: as response shows, we have in fact also gotten it brain cell "twitches" by direct stimulation of braincells. Sadly it didn't seem to be rigged up to measure overall brain activity.
We've grown human brain cells on a chip and had them play video games. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-brain-cells-on-a-computer-chip-learned-to-play-the-nostalgic-video-game-doom-180988447/
Two points:
So, guess I'll need to update my post slightly, but the core point remains.
That said, I felt that they were saying for half of it that they were running Doom on a braincell using computer, rather than getting a braincell computer to respond to it for half the article. Oh well.
What is it, then? And while you're there, what is non artificial consciousness?
I've thought more about the dangers of artificial consciousness than you would expect.
That says less than you want it to