what is it like to be a hard drive?
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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the substrate of stellar consciousness is millions of nuclear fusion reactions per second so they have spectacular processing power, they don't notice us because we're so slow
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and what are they doing with all that processing power? 'mining' heavy elements?
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constructing elaborate fictional worlds and beaming their ongoing stories into the universe *for free*, they're incredibly generous of spirit
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all lies. They tell you that at first, but in the end they all turn into bottomless frigid vortexes sucking the life out of everything.
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i'd be comfortable saying "everything is conscious" if i'm understood to be saying that everything has a consciousness value in the range (0..1) and it's very difficult to tell very small values from zero
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the interesting bit is that electrons are one of the very few things that actually are ~things~ in the sense that we use the word, like people definitely aren't so i may be asserting that every possible combinatoric set of every elementary particle has a consciousness
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I very much doubt that elementary particles are conscious, but I can't prove they're not. Then again, I can't prove they actually exist, that is something else I have to take on faith.
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