In my last post I offered a mathematical model of consciousness that is consistent with its 3 common meanings: the state of wakefulness and memory formation in animals, the externally undetectable subjective awareness that zombies supposedly lack, and the capacity to experience feelings such as happiness and suffering. Formally, the amount of conscious experience that an agent has between times t1 and t2 is the length of the shortest program that inputs a description of the agent at t1 and outputs a description at t2.
Let me call this "algorithmic consciousness" to distingish it from its other common meanings. It is measured in bits. You can think of human subjective time as having a rate of 5 to 10 bits per second over intervals of minutes or 0.5 to 1 bit per second over years, decreasing as you get older. In this model, which you don't have to accept, machines have greater consciousness than humans. They can experience centuries of subjective time in seconds. A few weeks ago I joined the Effective Altruism group to get their newsletter, although I still disagree with many of their policies. They talk about X-risk and S-risk. X-risk is the risk of extinction of all future life, which is worse than just human extinction. S-risk is the risk of suffering in humans, animals, and machines, present and future, which some, but not all, consider worse than X-risk. I could not get a consistent answer from the group on the general question of whether life as a whole has net positive, negative, or zero utility. In my model, the answer is zero. Both positive and negative reinforcement are measured in bits. Pleasure and pain are both learning experiences that we measure in how much you learned, not how the lesson was taught. I realize this seems counter intuitive. Usually the lesson is something that increases your reproductive fitness, because our software is a product of evolution. But getting everything you want doesn't make you happy. Happiness is the rate of increase of utility. A state of maximum utility in a finite system is static, the same as death. Pain does not cause suffering. Pain reprograms your brain to fear the thing that caused it. Fear overrides logical thinking. That's why a few EA's advocate human extinction. To me, the mystery of consciousness is not why thinking and perception and action feels like something. Feelings are computations. Your own mind seems mysterious to you because by Wolpert's law, no computer can model itself. You can't predict your own output. If you could, you would realize that free will is an illusion. The mystery to me is why time has a direction, when both quantum mechanics and general relativity are symmetric with respect to time. Quantum mechanics describes the exact state of a system by a deterministic wave function over spacetime, a second order differential equation whose solution is that observers (anything with memory) observe particles instead of waves. The particles appear random because the observer cannot have complete knowledge of the system that contains it. But how can memory (which algorithmic consciousness requires) exist in a unitary (time reversible) system, when writing a bit irreversibly erases the old value? I like Wolfram's theory that the universe is described by a few lines of code. But we can't ever know for sure because it would have to be tested on a computer outside our universe. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 2:17 AM Quan Tesla <[email protected]> wrote: > A solitary bit would probably not materialize consciousness. Meaning is > dependent on contextualized interpretation of collections of bits. The > material world is elementally experienced relatively, without violation. To > be accepted as evidence, "from first principles" has to be satisfied. > Science exists to describe these relative experiences (as observations) > within the material world from first principles. That is the accepted > benchmark for all scientific theoretical proposal and empirical evidence. > > To satisfy all the conditions of a relative consciousness-like function > for all possible objects, irrespective of level of abstraction, would > require a derivable, quantifiable construct of proto-consciousness. If we > would accept this proposed approach of a foundational qualification, we may > be progressing constructively. > > The notion of "bits of consciousness being probabilistically related to a > construct of proto-consciousness" vs "bits of consciousness" sounds > more-correctly concrete. However, this does not - on its own - predict the > emergence of all levels of identified human consciousness, including for an > involuntary substrate of consciousness. To translate the concrete to the > physical world would require a physical object embedded with an > architecture suitable for expressing observable evidence of consciousness. > For example, a nematode providing evidence of autonomic self awareness as a > recognizable degree of a consciousness-enabling hierarchy. > > I'm counter proposing how: > 1. A proto-consciousness construct of physical potential and > probabilistic, cognitive emergence of consciousness would be required for > materializing consciousness in the physical world; > 2. A construct of physical potential and probabilistic cognitive emergence > of consciousness should be foundationally supported by a measurable > universal construct of proto-consciousness. > > This hypothesis advances the foundation of 'Objective Collapse Theories', > with the following distinction from the core philosophical and physical > principles. > > 1. It expands Ontological Realism with prediction: The wave function > represents a dynamical, open system of physics, not just symbolic, logical, > and probability information. Therefore, its entropic saturation and > diffusion states must be measurable physical events. > > 2. It differs from "Universality" in that it argues in favor of a "from > first principles", falsifiable Heisenberg distinction between transient > classical and quantum states of the wave function, does not violate > Schrödinger equations, nor the Standard Model, with no free parameters. > > 3. It differs from "Spontaneity" in that: > i) It allows for a measurable local, observer-dependent collapse state of > an instance of the wave function, simultaneous to the collapse occurring > deterministically and objectively independent of any observer or measuring > device (proto-consciousness taking its natural course). > ii) It redefines environment (the vacuum of space and interactive > universe) as a potential proto-consciousness enabling environment, and as a > global and perceived non-local factor of deterministic proto-consciousness > persistence and cyclical collapse. > iii) Action-related, self-referential, coherent informational states are > continuously recorded and processed topologically and presented as > potentially accessible to conscious interrogation. > > > On Mon, 17 Aug 2026, 00:52 Matt Mahoney, <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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-Mdaf278fc20d3f8d696b46601> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T906c878e4ba411be-M5d21d7d47426b83da8dcb1d0 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
