I think defining consciousness is a bit of a tough problem. I am not sure hard-disks or viruses qualify, I suspect fish might, but it's very hard to prove that. When harddrives or viruses start passing Turing tests, then I'll be ready to consider it.
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you either get "hard problem" or "free will is an illusion" or "God is good so I'm not a brain in a jar" or "everything is conscious"
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I think I'm mostly ok with that last one too. It seems closer to correct (or satisfying to my aesthetics anyway) than the other three. I don't want to say _everything_ is conscious though. Figuring out what the varieties of consciousness are is a fun pursuit.
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human-style consciousness is already diverse, but then we have to account for stars, fish, starfish, aliens, starfish aliens, hard drives, and the hard drives of starfish aliens.
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I remember, as a kid, balking at a Frank Herbert story in which stars were conscious.
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thinking about the consciousness of things that live at vastly different time scales than humans is difficult. fungi and plants are already hard to accept, but with stars you're stretching it out to billions of times longer time scale than anything human-like.
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for plants a day is a breath and a year is a day. what is a star's breath?
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and at the end of the day it's just by fucking induction from a n=1 data set which is wonderful and hilarious
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