Consciousness as an emergent phenonenon

We speak of Artificial Intelligence.  We barely know what either idea means. Their definitions are wobbly, their scopes and slopes are slippery, they shake and squawk and squirm out from under our attempts to pin them down. But they are utterly stock still and simple compared to the ideas of sentience and consciousness.

Consciousness is this final and grandest stage of machine evolution. So what the hell does it mean? How do we know when it is achieved?

We don't know and we won't know and we are gonna have to live with that.  I mean you don't know what consciousness means, nor do I. You cannot prove that you are conscious much less that I am. If we cannot test one another for consciousness, we certainly won't be any more able to test a sentient machine for it. It's really quite intractable. I could go into it more deeply and demonstrate the truth of these assertions but others have done it before and better.

An awful, awful lot of very smart guys have firehosed their genius at this question and gotten nothing but wet.  Still this fiery question burns.  The question of consciousnessis a tale exuberantly prattled about by geniuses, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Fortunately, because Google has concisely summarized what they've collectively come up with I can save you a bunch of reading.

The very best treatment of the subject I have ever read (I will go so far as to say the best treatment of the subject yet made by man - but I'm admittedly a bit reckless sometimes.) on the subject is I Am a Strange Loop by Doug Hofstadter. Despite being both the son of a physicist, and an entrenched member of academia, he actually approaches the subject meaningfully, amazingly in his unique, rampantly multidisciplinary manner. A genuinely gorgeous book - a hundred times more approachable than Godel Escher Bach - but equally elevating. Do read it. (OK, yes, I do sort of worship the guy - get over it.)

In the past I have defined consciousness as awareness of awareness. It's as good a definition as I've found anywhere. I've also generally attributed it to a fifth thing, a quintessence. As something transcending the normal four things, matter, energy, space and time or fire, water, earth and air or dimension, force,  and consideration - however you want to divide up the universe. I've always thought that consciousness was separate from the things generally considered to be the constituent parts of the universe. Something transcendent.  Lately though I have been giving equal shrift to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of matter energy space and time.  Not something added to them from elsewhere, but derived from them in situ.

Consider temperature. An individual atom has no temperature. Stick a bunch of atoms near one another and let them do natural atomy things though and suddenly this idea of temperature emerges. Note that an individual atom does not have an intrinsic very small amount of temperatureness that adds together with other tiny amounts of temperatureness to become a perceptible/ measureable amount of temperature when atoms get together for a pow-wow. (or should it be a 'pow-pow'?) Temperature simply does not exist before they get together and after they do, it does.  This is called an epiphenomenon.  Or an emergent phenomenon.

Science posits implicitly (and often explicitly) that consciousness is an epiphenomenon. That everything we perceive as consciousness is brought about as a set of emergent phenomena whenever the exactly correct arrangement of matter energy space and time comes about. I have derided this idea in the past as the spontaneous combustion of mud. I was quite happy deriding it. I did not, do not and never will like the idea of being the cumulative deterministic effect of the stochastic fluctuations of myriad interacting disturbances in the subetheral grid (particles banging into one another) I do not want my dreads and dreams to be the result of particles colliding in such a way against other particles who have collided with them in such a way because other particles have collided with them in such another way in the past because of some uncaused original banginess.

Besides the fact that this mechanistic, deterministic point of view has all sorts of problems with regard to free will and the nature of responsibility etc and so on, ad nauseum.  I honestly just find it to be icky. It completely fails to grant the proper respect  to the care and feeding of my delusions of grandeur.

So while I acknowledge it as a possibility, I will point out that it is only a hypothesis and continue to feverently root against it. I offer the following as arguments supporting my position that consciousness is something special and quintessential and not reducible to an endless chain of head-banging particles:

The Floor

The floor is something we must fight against.
Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human
stance, it is that place that men fall to.

I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse;
the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face.
But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor;
my face into the floor, my attention bleeding into
the cracks of the floor.

Dear horizontal place, I do not wish to be a rug.
Do not pull at the difficult head, this teetering
bulb of dread and dream . . .

-Russel Edson

and

Sonnet to Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

-Edgar Allan Poe

and

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

-Walt Whitman

-j