It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my CPU had feelings, if the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have resulted in its death.

I'm talking about the current CPU.

> if the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have resulted in its death.

You can say that about flying too.

If the CPU was created in a billion year evolutionary process in which the lack of ability to flight would result in its death, the CPUs would fly.

Like, how is this relevant?

Can flight be properly explained in terms of signals flowing through a CPU? Yes or no?

Sure if it's badly written the CPU could get hot and all the side effects of running the code, maybe it's a virus.

if the machine has consciousness of thought and not just continuity of data, it would feel pretty bad with it's sensors (maybe even some total pain threshold metric) and might even cry or complain to a near by sentient being for help.

The problem is it may only speak to other beings of the same abstraction level, or higher and the listening being has to notice, have empathy, and the skillet to fix it.

If the program was coded to produce subjective feeling, no. Otherwise, it would suprise me very much. I believe what we call consciousness is selected for and is written into the structure our brains have. I do not beleive that consciouness exists outside of living brains. Maybe I am wrong but so far there has not been much evidence. I also do not believe consciousness is simply an accident but that it was specifically selected for by evolution.

People who have taken psychedelics may disagree but I think consciouness is tightly connected with sense of self, the ego. An organism that is conscious can have a sense of self. An organism with a sense of self may have a greater degree of flexible self preservation / flexible self promotion than a simple stimulus response network. Because we are conscious we focus on what we are feeling about our selves not just on the immediate sensory stimulus. Pyschedelics may break down the connection / integration of senses with self giving rise to the illusion of consciousness outside of the self-brain. But I would say this is an illusion.

> If the program was coded to produce subjective feeling

How would such a program work? What would it do in order to produce subjective feelings?

You do understand that you can not just write a program to do some arbitrary X if that's not within the capabilities of the hardware it's running on.

For example, you cannot write a program that would make the laptop fly. You need something that's physically capable of flying that can also be controlled by software. Like a drone or something.

Of course I understand that but you seem to be working from an assumption that brains are not sufficient hardware to run consciousness on. I submit Human wetware is a little more sophisiticated than your avant garde binary computer. That does not mean that consciouness is a superanatural or ethereal process not emanating from the brain.

> you seem to be working from an assumption that brains are not sufficient hardware to run consciousness on

I did not make such a statement. I made the point that computers certainly are not. Therefore you cannot reduce consciousness to information processing. For many reasons, the most important one is that "information processing" can be used to describe the flow of water in pipes, so if you say that is sufficient to produce consciousness then you must say that the sewage system is conscious.

Check out some documentaries on the octopus or the crow. You might have to revisit some of these theories.

Are you saying an octopus or a crow is not conscious? I am not saying that. To me it is clear that higher animals have a sense of self. Whether they can pass the paint dot test is another matter.

Depends on definition of “feelings”. I can define a “feeling” of a CPU as its temperature, whether it is rising or going down, which does not sound too wild because CPU may react to it and decrease its frequency or shut off some cores. How about cache usage patterns that are literally coping mechanism with the necessity to access main memory?