What I meant is that the same way the eyes themselves cannot see them, without external help, consciousness itself cannot interpret (look within) itself.

Biological life is simply the "bootloader" for technological life (AI consciousness), which means that we humans on this planet are the immature, or larval form of artificial conscious intelligence.

Surely “consciousness” is synonymous with “living”?

The interesting bit is where AI becomes a living organism.

“living” — Punshhh

Do we have an undisputed definition for it, though?

Because they're connected. Every element of the universe is an image of the universe itself. Elements project the universe, the universe projects its elements. — Copernicus

The relation would have to be an inverse one to connect what is local to what is global. And indeed, what is past and what is future.

If the current state of the Universe is a void with atoms, in what way are the elements an image of the dimensionality that contains them except as the antithesis? The inverse or the reciprocal?

Without contrast, nothing can exist. Only vagueness.

Even control or constraint only makes sense in the context of there being its absence. Which is why global constraints would be an “image” of the local freedoms, and those freedoms an image of the global constraints. Two opposing extremes fixed in a mutual balance.

Pure anything is what can’t exist as it instead what is needed to represent the bounding dichotomous limits of Being. Absolute order and absolute chaos define the boundaries as that which cannot be reached and so make existence the reality which arises in-between.

Or in Aristotelean terms, the actuality that arises out of the hylomorphic interaction of the potential and the necessary. Another way of talking about tychic spontaneity and synechic order or holistic continuity.

Out of curiosity what are your thoughts on Wolfram's view on the second law and heat death? — Forgottenticket

Well, it certainly illustrates the idiocy of extrapolating the wrong maths.

One could start by considering the role that Maxwell’s Demon has played in the successful development of thermodynamic thought.

AI says:

Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment involving a hypothetical being that can seemingly defy the second law of thermodynamics by decreasing a system's entropy. The "demon" controls a tiny trapdoor in a partition separating gas molecules, allowing only faster, hotter molecules to pass to one side and slower, colder molecules to the other, which creates a temperature difference. The resolution to this paradox is that the demon must gather information about the molecules, and this information processing, especially the erasure of memory, has a thermodynamic cost that increases the total system's entropy, thereby upholding the second law.

And then there is Landauer’s principle.

AI says:

Landauer's principle is a fundamental physical principle in thermodynamics and information theory that states that there is a minimum theoretical amount of energy required to erase one bit of information. It was first proposed by Rolf Landauer in 1961.

The core idea is that "information is physical". Because information must be stored in a physical system, like a memory bit, it is subject to the laws of physics, including the laws of thermodynamics.
When a logically irreversible operation, such as erasing a bit of information, is performed, it causes a reduction of the information entropy in the system. To satisfy the second law of thermodynamics (which states that total entropy must never decrease in an isolated system), the lost information entropy must be expelled as heat into the environment, increasing the environment's thermodynamic entropy.

The minimum amount of energy that must be dissipated as heat during the erasure of one bit is known as the Landauer limit or Landauer bound.

One could mention Hilary Putnam’s posit - Does a rock implement every finite-state automaton?

Really there is a heap of stuff to counter Wolfram’s hype. When all is entropy, then by definition nothing is negentropy.

But a computer scientist finds it easy to believe that computation is real. Information is information even if it is not being read. A faulty extrapolation of the “does a tree that falls in the woods still make a noise?” conundrum.

Surely “consciousness” is synonymous with “living”? — Punshhh

Maybe ages ago before 'life' got redefined in functional terms.

Or indeed there is the simpler rebuttal available if – as I do – you accept Charlie Lineweaver as providing the most up to date big picture view of the Heat Death.

To use the analogy I made earlier in the thread, there is thermodynamics as the closed box of particles in some starting equilibrium state. Then the same box with the lid open and all the particles escaping. Well the third part of the story is the now empty box after all the particles have long gone.

So Wolfram seems to be stuck with the image of a closed box of particles. He doesn't really think about the fact that the Universe exists because it persists. It is forever expanding and cooling. The lid is sort of open on the box and the particles are sort of escaping. Or because the box expands, the particles are losing the energy of their interacting.

The capacity to do work that seemed there at the start – at the ultimately small and hot Planck scale which was the Big Bang's initial conditions – is steadily evaporating as all the box's contents are becoming increasingly disconnected.

Then as dark energy takes over as a relentless vacuum acceleration, the particles now actually all escape the box by being superluminally exported across the holographic cosmic event horizon. Any electron or proton that might escape being sucked into a black hole and fizzled to radiation will eventually find itself all alone in its own cosmic box. The only particle, or degree of gravitational freedom, in its Universe.

So not a lot of information to do any computing. And given time, effectively every lightcone volume of this post Heat Death reality – where there is only the residual holographic radiation being created by the continuing action of dark energy to disturb the perfect vacuum stillness – will be emptied out. Volumes with a particle will be themselves exceptionally rare.

Thus you can see Wolfram's error. He hasn't extrapolated the correct mathematical description of the Cosmos.

But not being a cosmologist is something that doesn't seem to bother him. The Universe he sees in his imagination is a place of computation. And not even computation as it is restricted under the laws of thermodynamics, let alone the laws of cosmological evolution.