> Am 29.05.2026 um 06:45 schrieb Gregory Casamento <[email protected]>: > > I haven’t settled on a subject for my dissertation yet. One I am considering > is the nature of consciousness. The idea is that consciousness could be an > emergent property in complex systems.
Having done my PhD in the field of AI in the 90ies, I remember this topic. It was always part of discussions. It is searching for the holy grail and more a philosophical topic than computer science :) My personal view on consciousness is that the key is to be able to remember something and compare. Subconscious experiences are suddenly surfacing and from that moment on you can remember them. And if you loose consciousness you don't remember. So IMHO consciousness and the ability to remember is tightly connected. In technological terms: a Flip-Flop has the potential of 1 bit of consciousness. An AND gate hasn't. But as said it is the holy grail and almost everyone like Leibnitz, Turing, Wiener, Dreyfus, Weizenbaum, Minsky, Popper and many more (e.g. Susan Blackmore) have reasoned about that but there is no conclusive answer. So if you ask 10 people what consciousness is you will get 20 answers :) Adding another one is therefore an interesting topic. But it is far away from GNUstep... Almost the opposite side of the universe. BR, Nikolaus
