What is the nature of consciousness?
My biggest question has always been, and probably always will be, how non-sentient matter can become sentient.<p>Now, I&#x27;ll have to set aside things like panpsychism for now.  We&#x27;ll have to assume that individual atoms are non conscious.  Clearly consciousness is not a binary on&#x2F;off type thing, it&#x27;s a sliding scale.  If individual atoms are 0.0000001% conscious, then that changes everything.<p>Assuming they are <i>not</i>, what is it about gathering these non-sentient atoms together that suddenly gives rise to self-awareness?  If I gave you 2 billion atoms and told you to make them self-aware, what could you do?<p>Is it the structure of the atoms?  Is it the intercommunication of the parts of the brain?  Is it the information density?  Is it the resulting electrical activity that we can measure as brain waves?<p>Clearly, we can hook up an EEG to a patient and determine whether they are conscious or not.  The brain is still there.  The atoms are still there.  They are still in the same structure.  But the consciousness is gone.<p>I have been diving deep into this recently due to the rapid pace of AI development.  We need to understand what causes this to happen, to determine if it can happen in machines.  I don&#x27;t really see a reason it can&#x27;t, depending on which theory you go with.   If you read about the integrated information theory of consciousness, that leaves the door wide open for machines &#x2F; AI systems to become conscious, if they haven&#x27;t already.<p>If this has anything to do with information density, then AI will rapidly become &quot;more concious&quot; than humans.  But it will still lack qualia.  The pain of a headache, the smell of a rose, the redness of a sunset.  I am not sure what type of consciousoness that AI would even have.  The subjective experience would be vastly unfamiliar to anything we understand.<p>Ok, I&#x27;ve gone on long enough about this.   I&#x27;m already too confused as it is.  Maybe we&#x27;re not meant to know.