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Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by Dylan16807 on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:50PM (#30212995)
If it's only one protein, is that protein primitively conscious?

It's not interacting with anything else to make those decisions, it's completely autonomous.

> observing effect, learning from it

If something is meaningfully doing that, then we're getting to consciousness. But I'll note that I don't count natural selection as "learning" here.

And observing the results of decisions and learning is not mandatory to survive and reproduce.

Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by visarga on Friday February 04, 2022 @04:01PM (#30213136)
Natural selection is the outer loop, reinforcement learning the inner loop. Agents, by living or dying, send signals into the system, guiding the process.
Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by Dylan16807 on Friday February 04, 2022 @04:04PM (#30213182)
Natural selection is not conscious, and agents don't need to have reinforcement.