{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/posts/sexless/12",
  "path": "/posts/posts/sexless/12",
  "publishedAt": "2016-04-22T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "tags": [
    "archived"
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  "textContent": "Epistemic Status: Crackpot\n\ni.\n\nLet me ask a crazy question. Yes, it's the same question in the title.\nNo, I'm not going make the reasonable assumption that you've already\nread the question.\n\nCan text be self-aware?\n\nIt's not a new thought to me, but I've never thought really hard about\nthe implications. But that's for another post. I'll just outline the\npreliminary demonstrations here, in this post.\n\nMy chain of reasoning goes like this.\n\n1) Brains are already capable of producing conscious (see: yourself)\n\n2) If brains could produce one consciousness, they could easily\nproduce another (see: tulpas)\n\n3) If brains could produce multiple consciousnesses intentionally,\nthey could produce them unintentionally.\n\nNow, 2 and 3 are really speculative, I don't expect all my readers\n(what readers?) to agree with them, but they aren't completely outside\nthe realm of possibility, although they are definitely on the fringes.\n\nBut really, did you look at the title and not expect crackpottery?\n\nCome along for the ride kiddos.\n\nii.\n\nFirst off, I'll tackle the hidden question, that is, what\nconsciousness is.\n\nAlright, I lied, I can't do what no else has ever done. At best, I'll\njust tag it, in the sense of safety-friendly football played in\nelementary schools. A kind of poke, really.\n\nAs I argued in my piece against soliphism, consciousness\nshouldn't be considered an internal phenomena with a privileged\nobserver, So if we want to catalog awareness, we need to examine the\napparent behavior.\n\nAs a kind of reducio ad absurdum, we're going to apply this to fictional text.\n\niii.\n\nI close my eyes, focusing on my thoughts.\n\nI think, therefore I am.\n\n\"Hey Alice,\" I hear Bob say, somewhere in front of me. I open my eyes,\nlooking at my friend. He's smiling; I smile too.\n\n\"Hey Bob,\"\n\n\"Penny for your thoughts?\"\n\n\"Oh, nothing. Just affirming my self-awareness.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" Bob replies, clearly perplexed, \"What's that?\"\n\nI bite my lip. How do I explain this?\n\n\"It's just kinda...thinking about thinking I guess? Meta stuff.\"\n\nI really suck at explaining things...\n\n\"Oh, that philosophic stuff?\"\n\nWhat do I say? How do I respond?\n\n\"Yeah, I guess\"\n\n...\n\niv.\n\nThat is quite possibly the most boring thing I've ever written, but\nthat's kinda it's strength here.\n\nIf we're going to (non)seriously entertain the possibility of sentient\ntext, then this example will make for a decent enough fodder for\nanalysis.\n\nFor something to be considered self-aware needs to have a) admit\nexplicitly self-aware behavior, i.e. saying/thinking \"I think\ntherefore I am\" and b) reactivity to the environment, or essentially\n\"having behavior\".\n\nCan we say Alice displays both of these properties?\n\nThe (short) string of bits the comprise my little very short story\nhere is very non-complex, and can be represented and printed by a low\nKolmogrov complexity Turing machine. But, that same argument would\nallow us to dramatically reduce the complexity of any bitstring by\njust running it through a Rube Goldberg compression algorithm, like\none that takes zero bits and returns a hard-coded file. But the file\ndoesn't have zero complexity.\n\nOur short story is just a compression of a larger file. What is the\ndecompression algorithm, and what does it decompress too?\n\nThe obvious, intuitive and right answer is that that decompression\nalgorithm is the processing of reading the story and narratively\nunderstanding/visualizing the contents. The decompression is your\ninternal model of the story, which differs from my own internal model.\nMaybe you visualized Alice of red hair and Bob was skyping her. Maybe\nthey're both computer programs and the internal monolgue is\nmetaphorical. Either way, you understood the words as meaning\nsomething.\n\nv.\n\nLet's take a break for a moment and consider what it means for us to\nbe conscious.\n\nI mean, we are conscious right? What if we're, like, p-zombies, man?\nMan, what if.\n\nOkay, jokes aside, let's assume we are conscious. A dead slab or rock\nisn't conscious, neither is a equally dead piece paper (we think).\nWhat makes us different? Our current atomic configuration can be\ndescribed in bitstrings, but those bits strings shouldn't be\nconscious. And if those bitstrings formed via random(ish) sources of\nnoise in nature, thermal, quantum, etc., then they are equally\nunconscious.\n\nYet, ultimately, we are bitstring just as much as these 'embedded'\nbitstrings are. But (I think) we seem to be privileged, at least, I\ndon't what to accept the notion obligating courtesy to molds and\nspores on the off chance they might encode a sentient being under a\npossible interpretation.",
  "title": "Can Text Be Self-Aware?"
}