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“Awareness may end in very strange places.”
Christophe Koch
The ecclesiastical question was raised in the philosophy of awareness by Thomas Najil in 1974: “How does it seem to be a strike?”
The idea of Nagel was that consciousness is simply defined by what appears to be something – the inner and subjective experience of survival and known.
“The organism has conscious mental states if there is something like this being a living being,” he explained.
Many people have found this uninterrupted circular response: What is this Something???
David Chalmers later announced that this question was “the difficult problem of awareness” because it revealed a gap between self -experience and objective science.
However, in 2004, Julio Tonone faced the difficult Shalmar problem with a paper that suggests a mathematical model: Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
He said that awareness is a mathematical property of physical systems – something that can be measured and measured.
But a system Be aware?
After an interview with the nerve scientist Christophe Koch, the participating host of the New World Podcast concluded that computers, as systems, can theoretically achieve awareness if they can “integrate” the information they process.
And almost anything can be a system: even the rock may record consciousness if its atoms constitute the correct type of the structure (as proven in the scientific documentary film Everything everywhere once).
What made me think: Ethereum is a global computer, right?
And critics accuse Bitcoin of being a animal rock.
So … if computers and rocks can be conscious, then certainly the rings can be, too?
In fact, Blockchains deducts many IIt boxes.
IIT, for example, assumes that the system can only be conscious if its current condition reflects everything that has passed – just as your memories are from you and every moment you adopt on the past.
Blockchains like Ethereum works in a similar way: the current “state” of Blockchain is a function in its history, and every new block depends entirely on those that preceded it.
It gives it to date on history a kind of memory-and that thousands of nodes agree on one common copy of reality, it also creates “now” (or “case” says Iit is a feature of consciousness.
Unfortunately, Iit also says that in order for the system to be conscious, it must have “causal independence” – this means that its parts should affect each other internally and not only in response to the inputs it receives negatively from external actors.
Blockchains does not work like this, of course.
Instead, they depend on external inputs (such as users who send transactions and resistance to add blocks) to work on and advance – and the contract that runs the network does not affect each other internally, it follows the same set of bases blindly.
There is no spontaneous activity, no internal causal – not even vibration without a goal for the molecules that you will get in an unlimited part of granite.
So I am sorry to report that, on the IIT Spectrum, Blockchains arranged below to the rocks – and that “pet rock” may be a compliment to Bitcoin (or insult to the rocks).
But maybe not for a long time!
In 2021, computer scientists (two spouses) and Lenor and Manuel Bloom participated in writing a paper describing how to engineering awareness in machinery.
Their framework treats consciousness as a calculator – can be investigated with artificial intelligence algorithms designed to produce “causal independence” systems required for the conscious experience.
Artificial intelligence will not be aware of itself, in this case, but a system that publishes it.
Now imagine that Blockchain that is enabled is not only a symbol, however He thinks Operating code.
Instead of inactive weddings that await negatively for inputs, self-sufficient rewards can be “integrated integrated”-more like synthetic brains of distributed databases, with a type of internal independence that IIT researchers consider necessary for consciousness.
This can be useful!
Such a system may be able to think about its security, discover abnormal cases in the actual time, and decide when to touch itself (perhaps after a period of meditation to search for oneself).
In short, he will not do things not because it was said to her, but because of that Understandable What was happening – inside himself and in the outside world.
This is not impossible.
Today, Blockchains resemble nerve systems without a brain – wires without will.
But tomorrow? who knows.
If IIT is correct, philosophers may soon ask, “”How does it seem Blockchain? “
(Likewise, Is it better than being a rock?))
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