If we accept that qualia are specific to consciousness, then it matters in terms of gestalt classification whether a rock should be treated as a conscious object, or not. As stated before, my view is that proto-consciousness is pervasive via the wave function. For now, I hold the view that qualia is distinct from proto-consciousness, but somehow associated.
On Wed, 02 Sept 2026, 16:07 Matt Mahoney, <[email protected]> wrote: > Back to your original question of whether rocks have qualia, what does > that mean? How would you know? What would be the difference if it did or > did not? > > If you use my definition of measuring consciousness in bits of information > in a storage device, then zinc sulfide doped with copper (used in glow in > the dark paint) will store photons of blue light by raising an electron to > a higher energy state and storing in a copper atom. After several minutes > it will release the electron and emit a 550 nm yellow green photon. > Likewise, light will convert silver iodide to tiny grains of silver that > appear black in photographic film for more permanent storage. > > LLMs are trained on 20 TB of text, which is 20,000 times as much conscious > experience as a human. If that's the definition you want to use. You tell > me. > > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > > On Wed, Sep 2, 2026, 9:52 AM Quan Tesla <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Thanks for sharing. Most useful application. Reminds me of the shift to: >> noise = real signal. >> >> On Wed, 02 Sept 2026, 15:25 John Rose via AGI, <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >>> On Wednesday, September 02, 2026, at 9:03 AM, Quan Tesla wrote: >>> >>> Can competitive commerce and tortoise-like human decision systems afford >>> to wait 3 to 10 months before starting to adapt to an "aware" AI-corporate >>> reality? >>> >>> >>> No. For example things like this need to be scrutinized for rogue AI's >>> from a national security perspective: >>> >>> https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Template:DatabaseUNID >>> >> *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-M97fe72d55cc5904b6dc7ef59> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T906c878e4ba411be-M3fd92b672493558ac18f98e7 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
