See this paper: “If Materialism is True, the United States is Probably Conscious”

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.ht...

This builds on a basic fallacy:

1. According to materialism, consciousness is purely a result of physical processes.

2. Our consciousness is complex.

3. Therefore, materialism says that any physical entity with a complexity comparable to us is probably conscious.

At best, going from the two premises to the conclusion involves a tendentious and useless definition of 'consciousness' that equivocates over the specific features of the consciousness of genus Homo that make it distinctly interesting. Tononi's IIT makes the same mistake.

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823

So: Consciousness = Complexity + X

X = what?

And how can we be sure that, whatever the X is, that the United States does not have it?

Firstly, consciousness is probably not well-modeled as arbitrary complexity plus X, as the complexity is likely inherent to X, and have a quite specific form. For example, it seems unlikely, on basic information-theoretic grounds, that the notoriously complex turbulent flow of a fluid in a pipe is materially closer to consciousness than laminar flow in that pipe.

Secondly, the burden of proof (or just of showing evidence) rests squarely on the person making the claim that the United States probably has it (whatever 'it' happens to be.) It is hard to do that whan you cannot say, with any specificity at all, what X is.

If your latest post is intended to be a defense of Schwitzgebel's paper, I think you are missing his point. I think he regards the consciousness of the United States counterfactually, and is attempting to show that materialism leads to an implausible conclusion, but he fails to do so, partly on account of the problem I raised in my original post.

> What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a whole?

There's also the question of the nodes and edges of the graph; does the complexity (or processing capability) of these have any effect on the complexity bounds?

That is - compare a neuron as the node (and the dendrites as the "edges") in the larger graph of the neural network that is the human brain. Each node and edge are relatively simple compared to the entire brain.

Now - what happens when that brain becomes the node (via a human) and the edges of the graph of interaction in society becomes the internet (social networking, email, etc)? Both are much more complex than the former - so do we need fewer nodes/edges to "kickstart consciousness"?

The problem of course is how can we (as individual nodes) perceive this consciousness? How could we ever query it? And - if we could query it - and it perceived us querying it - what would it do?

If for instance - you perceived one or more of your neurons suddenly say "Hey - I'm a neuron - can you talk to me? I want to know what you are thinking? Helloooo?" - what would you do?

Well - more than a few of us would probably head to the doctor in an attempt to either shut that neuron up or remove it or kill it or...you get the idea.

So - if we were to do the same thing...?

Information could be encoded in molecule oscillations and therefore 2 rocks of different temperatures would communicate it when touching (heat transfer would occur). Can this be considered processing?

It's doubtful you'll be able to make such a scheme work: Information processing tends to involve storage and retrieval of data. That's not really possible in the thermodynamic regime. You'd have to do all your processing before the information gets lost to thermalization.

Image recognition needs no storage or retrieval of data: it's a single pass thru a series of matrix multiplications. Yet, image recognition is the very definition of data processing.

How do you propose to perform calculations without data storage (think registers)?

Like this for example https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/neural-network-in-glass-requ... though I'm not sure that you can really count this as calculation. But I guess that's the point of this discussion.

Heat is entropy, but entropy is basically a measure of disorder/randomness. So when two substances transfer heat, they necessarily are not communicating information, except perhaps that there exists a temperature differential.