this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
12 points (80.0% liked)
Technology
84381 readers
4423 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There’s such a debate over whether or not cells in a dish have consciousness, and whether or not pure silicon representations of those cells would also have consciousness.
So very little effort goes into defining what consciousness is, because humans are scared to find that there are really only two likely possibilities: almost everything is conscious, or nothing (including us) is.
philosophers are in shambles over this comment.
for real tho, people have been trying to define consciousness forever. the problem isn’t that we haven’t tried; it’s that—as demonstrated by your comment—we’ve mostly failed.
for me the only theory that doesn’t depend wholly on magical thinking is panpsychism: everything is conscious; it’s just a matter of degree.
IMHO it's a sliding scale not a simple yes/no question.
Is a single cell conscious? It reacts to stimuli in a very basic manner, so there is a rudimentary awareness and I would put it towards the lower end of the consciousness scale. Can it perceive itself though aka does it have self-awareness? I doubt it. But where does (self-)consciousness or awareness start? That's probably the same as asking "What's life"? People have been debating the question for ages and there are edge cases that blur the lines such as viruses.
Yeah, the definition of "conscious" really is a puzzle. My guess is that the "nothing is conscious" model has a great deal of crossover with the "free will doesn't exist" one; for both of those, I don't consider them useful models even if they end up being true: if I'm not actually conscious and just think I am, I might as well behave as though I am.
Regardless, we really do need to define what exactly we mean by "conscious" before we can have a meaningful discussion about it. Where's Socrates when we need him?