Before we can answer the question of consciousness in rocks, we need a testable definition of consciousness. We avoid the philosophical zombie definition because it explicitly says that no test exists. Whatever definition we choose should be consistent with our intuition that humans >= other mammals > insects > plants. Consciousness need not be restricted to living things because life is defined by reproduction, which is independent of thinking or computation.
Humans are not conscious all the time. The difference between wakefulness and non REM sleep is that in the latter case, no information is written into memory. Consciousness is also something that seems worth preserving, both in ourselves and in the case of social animals, in others. This is tied to our evolved survival instinct but also applies to machines. We pay for storage and object to books being burned or files being deleted. Therefore I propose that conscious entities be capable of storing information and consciousness be measured in bits per second of write speed. Living organisms can store information both in brains and in DNA. Humans have a long term memory capacity on the order of 10^9 bits and a write speed of 10 bits per second short term and 1 bps long term. We also have 10^9 bits stored in DNA, but the maximum write speed of evolution is log(number of offspring) per generation, which is 10^10 times slower. Plants have genome sizes similar to humans (sometimes larger) but a consciousness level about 10^-10 times smaller by this definition. - A rock has no memory or consciousness. - A tree has at most a few bits of consciousness, less than one second of subjective time over its lifetime. - Insects have < 100 bits of memory (bees telling the hive where to find pollen), which is a few seconds of subjective experience. - An LLM with 100B parameters has 10,000 years of human level subjective experience compressed into a few weeks of training. - A quantum computer is unitary, so it has no storage capacity, and is not conscious. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Sun, Aug 16, 2026, 2:32 AM Quan Tesla <[email protected]> wrote: > Rocks are not known to possess consciousness-emergent "brain-like" > architecture. One must separate the wave function from consciousness > functionality. They aren't equivalent. All matter may be related to the > wave function dynamics (that's probably why growth emerges). > Stagnation/Saturation and Death/Reset are very interesting states within > ave function probability, but could mostly be attributed to environmental > triggers directly related to the manifestation of these states of > existence. Even so, within a mathematical treatment of the wave function > mechanics, these states could respectively be simplified as selective k > states [k=0, t=0] (equilibrium) and k=-1 (Reset/Death). For clarity, it may > be that the Rhiemann critical line also relates to (not matches exactly) a > transient k=0 state. > > I don't have exact consciousness measurement criteria, but I do have a > theorem in progress and am still thinking about it. I'm convinced such-like > criteria could be formalized for all material objects in our physical > world, even if for most physical objects the results may prove to be a > negative or null hypothesis. As for the IIT's unproven version of universal > consciousness, their proposed "metric" is derivable from the Fibonacci > construct. The best I'm willing to concede at this point is that the wave > function offers potential for enabling proto-consciousness. > > On Sat, Aug 15, 2026 at 5:33 PM John Rose via AGI <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Tuesday, August 11, 2026, at 3:19 PM, Quan Tesla wrote: >> >> In this view, a rock cannot be consciouss, but a simple organism may >> exhibit environmental and self-similar awareness. >> >> >> What if a particular rock has some extraordinary properties, magnetic, >> piezoelectric, psychoacoustic, crystaline >> structure, etc. surely there is some rock that measures > 0 using your >> consciousness measurement criterea? >> >> *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T906c878e4ba411be-M0f0d34c7d1097bcf43a78cd1> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T906c878e4ba411be-M933af516c4a3b8487ed91593 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
