Consciousness is an evolved information system requirement in all life forms that are complex enough to be capable of computationally modelling their environment, and importantly, their own place in that environment. You cannot model the world and your place in it without consciousness.
Also, consciousness is not binary (present or not), it is a gradient. I am more conscious than I was this morning when I groggily opened my eyes and hadn't yet fully booted up my model of the world. I am more conscious than my dog, which is more conscious than my goldfish, which is more conscious than a worm, etc. A dragonfly has consciousness, but only enough to model, "I am here. I want to eat that."
The scary bit about consciousness being a gradient is that we kind of consider ourselves the pinnacle of life forms mostly because of the complexity of our conscious experience. If consciousness is simply an emergent property of sufficiently complex information modelling, than assuming continued increases in computational capability, we're probably on the brink of creating consciousness that is "more conscious" than ourselves. And by our own definition of import, this consciousness will exceed our own place in the universe.
Will human life be the most important consideration in the universe if there is an artificial intelligence (actually, there will be nothing artificial about it) that is capable of modelling and empathizing with billions of life forms on an individual level?
There are two types of gradient though, conceptually.
If consciousness is some state of matter that is unknown still, and each neuron, for example, contains "one bit" of consciousness, then the gradient is that as you add more neurons, you add more complexity to the consciousness, but you do not change the fundamental experience of consciousness. You add more content but not more experience in itself.
If on the other hand consciousness is this emergent phenomenon that depends on neurons and their connections, then the gradient (and thus the experience) would be far more diverse and there would be a lot of different ways consciousness could "feel".
The problem I have is that for example, as far as my brain can remember, stimuli has looked the exact same all throughout my life. If I saw my a tree when I was 10, and I saw the same tree now, the conscious "qualia" of this would look exactly the same. To me this is a mystery, that the connections in the brain do not change the experience of qualia at all. Red looks like red no matter what the neuronal state of your brain is. I don't have an answer to this but just something I've been thinking about.
> If consciousness is simply an emergent property of sufficiently complex information modelling, than assuming continued increases in computational capability, we're probably on the brink of creating consciousness that is "more conscious" than ourselves. And by our own definition of import, this consciousness will exceed our own place in the universe.
You went from 'consciousness exists on a gradient' (makes sense) to 'consciousness exists due to information modelling' which is a non sequitur.
Consciousness could be due to information modelling.
It could also be due to our brain's reliance on dopamine.
Or maybe it's due to a heretofore unknown enzyme that taps into a quantum field.
Or any other explanation.
There is no way to prove that consciousness relies on information modelling. That's a major assumption.
Also, consciousness is not binary (present or not), it is a gradient. I am more conscious than I was this morning when I groggily opened my eyes and hadn't yet fully booted up my model of the world. I am more conscious than my dog, which is more conscious than my goldfish, which is more conscious than a worm, etc. A dragonfly has consciousness, but only enough to model, "I am here. I want to eat that."
The scary bit about consciousness being a gradient is that we kind of consider ourselves the pinnacle of life forms mostly because of the complexity of our conscious experience. If consciousness is simply an emergent property of sufficiently complex information modelling, than assuming continued increases in computational capability, we're probably on the brink of creating consciousness that is "more conscious" than ourselves. And by our own definition of import, this consciousness will exceed our own place in the universe.
Will human life be the most important consideration in the universe if there is an artificial intelligence (actually, there will be nothing artificial about it) that is capable of modelling and empathizing with billions of life forms on an individual level?