Hi, thanks so much for your reply — you've given me a lot to think about. I really appreciated the connection you drew between Plato’s lyre argument in the Phaedo and modern debates around emergence. I hadn't made that link before, and it's a compelling parallel.

I also liked your discussion of the Pythagorean view of being as mathematics. Personally, I don’t resonate all that well with this idea — though I’ll admit I haven’t explored it deeply. I’m a nominalist, in the sense that I see mathematics as an incredibly effective tool for describing and predicting the behavior of systems that exhibit regularity. The universe, as it appears to us, behaves in highly structured and regular ways, which is likely why mathematics is so successful. But I don’t think that means mathematics is the essence of being.

As a physicist myself, I’d argue that physics can only ever tell us about the relations between things, not their intrinsic nature. This is because physical theories work by specifying how systems change relative to one another—how one thing influences another over time and space. Whether we’re talking about force fields, wavefunctions, or geometric structures in spacetime, all of it is defined relationally. We never get a glimpse of what a thing is “in itself,” only how it behaves in a web of other things.

You raised this thought experiment:

So would a carefully constructed neural network made from pipes and water wheels that is set up to process inputs and outputs like a human brain be conscious? Could we carefully set up toilet paper rolls to be conscious? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Very good point. If we take informational or structural accounts of consciousness seriously, then in principle, any system that implements the relevant patterns should be conscious—even ones made from absurd materials.

That said, I think we can sort these possibilities into three broad camps:

• 1. Consciousness is a purely relational or informational property, and any system that mirrors the brain’s causal structure would be conscious—regardless of its physical makeup.
  
• 2. Consciousness is still informational, but the kinds of informational structures that give rise to consciousness can only be supported by certain kinds of physical processes—such as biological ones. In this view, consciousness arises from information, but complex processes like glial signaling, cellular metabolism, or quantum coherence might unlock a richer space of informational dynamics. These aren’t just “decorations” on top of neural processing—they expand what kinds of patterns are even possible, potentially enabling consciousness where simpler systems (like pipes or silicon) can’t.
  
• 3. Consciousness isn’t informational per se, but is the product of some other kind of natural mechanism—possibly a novel quantum effect or a highly specific interaction type. To be clear, I don’t mean something non-physical or mystical here. I mean something still grounded in nature, but not captured by standard informational models. If that were the case, then consciousness might be more “substance-like” in the sense that only systems with the right physical properties could support it, regardless of structure.

Personally, I lean toward either the first or second view. I find the third possible, but it would likely require extensions or reinterpretations of physics. The second view seems like the best middle ground: consciousness is still relational or informational, but subject to real physical constraints. In other words, not all informational structures are physically realizable—only certain complex, fine-tuned systems (like living bodies) can support the right kinds of interactions.

On Terrence Deacon — I haven’t read his work yet, but I’ll definitely check it out. The idea of using semiotics and constraint-based models to rethink causation sounds right up my alley. I also completely agree that substance-based metaphysics struggles to handle emergence. If we view things as nothing more than what they’re made of, then so-called emergent phenomena—waves, organisms, minds—end up being treated as mere large-scale approximations of the "real" underlying stuff. That feels deeply unsatisfying. It undermines the explanatory power and causal relevance of the very patterns that define higher-level reality.

That’s one reason I’m drawn to process metaphysics. I’d argue that much of modern physics is already (mostly) process-based. While we still refer to entities like quantum fields as kind of “substances,” (although, again, we don't really explain what they are - only their role in an enormous web of interactions with other things) what physics mostly does is track interactions, transformations, and constraints over time. It describes evolving relationships, not timeless chunks of being.

In my own field—complex matter organization—I’ve noticed that many systems seem to operate in a way that’s semi-teleological. We regularly work with attractor states, self-organizing processes, and feedback loops that appear goal-directed - a shift I've seen in recent years within physics. This contrasts with more mechanistic branches of physics where behavior is rigidly determined by initial conditions. But it seems unlikely that we live in a reality where some systems operate teleologically and others mechanically. That would imply a strangely split ontology. Whatever causal model we settle on—mechanistic, teleological, or something else—it likely applies universally.

Thanks again for such a thoughtful comment — I’ve really enjoyed reflecting on all of this.

Hi all, just to let you know I'll reply later individually to your comments. You've given me a lot of thinking/reading to do! Especially @Count Timothy von Icarus !

Well, I'm a physicist so I'm going to be biased toward the physicalist/materialist PoVs. I tend to think that property dualism explains things reasonably well, though.

It's basically based on the premise that if two systems have the same outputs for all inputs, they are functionally the same system.

If an AI has the same outputs as a human might do for all inputs, then it logically follows that they are functionally the same type of system too. Therefore an AI that passes the Turing test is likely conscious

It's true that we cannot directly observe consciousness, so there will never be any 100% certainty that an AI (or even another human) is conscious.

However, the reasoning I outlined in the post could be a justification as to why the Turing test might be a good way to verify if an AI is sentient or not. This is of course, based on the assumption that something of similar structure and functioning to a human brain would also be conscious

Some say there's a set of mathematical laws governing the universe. The system of mathematics, as Godel's theorems show, has no finite, consistent set of axioms that can prove all theorems. It's a system in which you'd have to have to repeatedly add axioms to ever form a single 'mathematics'. If there really were some platonic realm of mathematical laws, governing matter and its behavior within the universe, it hardly seems likely that there would be an infinite system with only a minute subsection of it being special enough to be given some sway on reality. Even then we'd need a meta set of laws to describe what is so special about this subsection.

A system like mathematics is incredibly versatile. It's a system that can be made to basically describe any regularly behaving system. Any regularly behaving thing can have variables assigned to parts of it, and so long as the interactions between these parts are consistent, we can apply some mathematical rules to it. The same could be said for many systems of logic. If we assign variables to the fundamental components of a system, and they interact in a consistent way, then logic can be made to describe it.

The point is that mathematical rules are a thing that humans project onto the world and the universe does have fundamental parts that interact with one another in consistent ways. Hence why it seems to be so weirdly mathematical. It is no coincidence that we can apply rules to the universe that seem to be so heavily mathematical and logical in nature.

So maybe the universe doesn't have a platonic realm of rules dictating the material. If it did, then surely it would be immaterial itself.

But why do the parts of the universe exist in the way that they do? If there is indeed an explanation for that, say reason A, what is the reason for A to be the case? We get this infinite chain of causality unless at some point we accept that not everything has to be the way it is for a reason. Some things simply are.

If we accept this premise, then the answer of "where do the laws of the universe come from?", could simply be nowhere. The universe exists in the way it does just because.

For evolutionary reasons, our monkey brains always feel the need to see every effect as having a cause. But the universe wasn't built to satisfy us.

Here, I was conjecturing that if consciousness can effect the physical activity of the brain, then since the brain is a physical object, consciousness would need some physical mechanism to effect it. If consciousness had a physical mechanism of sorts to effect matter, then we could go about "detecting consciousness" through the detection of this physical mechanism. This would make things easier than if we assume consciousness to be purely some non-physical, emergent property of the brain like a lot of people think nowadays- such a thing cannot really be observed with standard scientific instruments.

So in other words, if consciousness were able to couple to matter somehow, detection of it would be easier.

That being said, the overall question of the post was whether or not the moulding of the brain through evolution, and indeed the way it regulates its own activity on a day-to-day basis, is done in such a way that it takes into account what information is and isnt thrown into our conscious perception.

Maybe a better way of putting it is whether or not the brain "acts" as if consciousness is there or not. If the brain behaves as if consciousness does exist, then it will actively regulate what information falls into and out of our conscious perception.

If the brain acts as if consciousness is not there at all, then its simply a matter of the brain naturally doing its thing and for some reason, some of the informational processing happens to pop into our conscious perception and some doesn't.

If its the former, and the brain needs to actively regulate what goes into and out of our conscious perception, then its likely that consciousness can have some effect on matter. The brain would not actively shape itself to accommodate for something that can have no effect on it.

Its a bit of a tricky one to explain but hope that makes sense

Follow up thought: It seems strange that if indeed the brains activity were regulated without regard to what enters our consciousness, why everything that does enter our consciousness seems so coherent and noiseless.

However from a survival perspective, it seems wrong that uncoherent, noisy information would become highly integrated and take up "more processing" than other activity. This would mean that regardless of whether option A or B is correct, consciousness would be pretty similar in the sense that it would not contain a lot of noise and be reasonably well organised.

What I would say is that the party analogy is based on the assumption that other people exist that will/did show up to the party at some point or another. With intelligent life, this isn't necessarily the case.

The analogy would be better suited if we were to say that someone shows up to a party, with no knowledge of whether or not there are other people that will/did show up. So either someone did show up, will show up, or nobody ever/never will show.

As a physicist myself, this is a very important question, given the amount of emphasis the field places on ‘information’ right now. It seems to be treated as a real, tangible thing by most scientists, yet strangely its fundamental nature never seems to be questioned. If one examines multiple physical systems that contain ‘information’, I feel as though the definition seems to get pretty arbitrary quickly.

One could perhaps with reasonable certainty say that the fundamental unit or ‘quanta’, of information are bytes. Bytes can be expressed in countless systems in countless different ways. One can assign the notion of ‘bytes’ to transistors, saying that there is a 1 when it is switched on and zero when off. Equally one could create a system in which we have a crowd of people interacting in a way such that when someones hand is raised, this represents a 1 and lowered represents a zero- computation can be achieved just as effectively, data can be stored; as far as things go, such a system would have the exact same properties of any computer with its information processing etc. The point here is that any physical object or system can have these ‘bytes’ and the bytes themselves can manifest themselves in innumerable physical ways. So if bytes/information are a real, physical thing, how can they express themselves in the same ways in completely different physical systems?

Maybe information is this invisible, transcendental thing that can be seen to express itself in all manners of completely different systems in arbitrary ways or perhaps, information is simply an abstract concept we assign to things- surely it is one of the two. There is little reason to believe the former- to do so would be faith (there is no proof for information being some real, physical thing after all). It is more reasonable to assume that information is an abstract concept we assign to systems- there is no ‘physical’ aspect to it (as there is really no reason to believe it is). A physical thing would have limits to what it can be seen in and influence, whereas information does not. The physical reality is that the transistor has current flowing towards it or doesn’t, the individual has raised his\her hand or not- we then take the leap to label each of these binary states 1 or 0 and say that they transmit or store ‘information’. In reality these systems are completely different, there is no physical thing that is being stored/transmitted by both as there is really no common ground between them besides our labelling of certain aspects of them.

So in the conventional sense at least id say that information is not ‘real’.

How do we define this abstract concept? Well, if system A has a lot of ‘information’ on system B, then from system A’s state (from its fundamental quantities maybe, its position, momenta, temperature, order etc) we can deduce a lot about system B and the quantities associated with it. Again, the key is we can ‘deduce’. In reality these two systems are simply similar to one another or connected- we take the step to take certain qualities of A that are similar to B and label these ‘information’, disregarding the innumerable other qualities of the system that we can deduce less about B from. There is nothing physically special about these qualities apart from the fact that we can use them to find out more about the nature of B.

I think the main argument I'd use against the recurrence conjecture is that if the universe was truly repetitive, then surely we would be far more likely to come to being in an isolated pocket of order amongst a lot of disorder. But we see today a large amount of order seemingly with no disorder surrounding. The number of states that entails human beings coming into existence in small pockets of order surely outnumber those of us coming into being in a whole universe of order?

As a side note I don't think the universe not being a static, finite volume is a valid argument against the conjecture. If the universe is expanding like it is today, given enough time (an incredibly large amount of it) it will surely randomly contract again and at points be completely static (assuming theres any fluctuations in the expansion of the universe at all, which it is agreed there probably is).

The only true argument I can conceive is that time must end if the conjecture isn't true. if there were some sort of 'irreversible' change that happened in the universe that meant say, that protons and neutrons can't for atomic nuclei, given an extraordinarily large amount of time surely that rule will be defied at some point or another on a large scale.

Also as one last point, if we define the laws of physics as mathematical rules describing persistent patterns in nature (that probably aren't inherently mathematical but maths is a good tool for measuring things like these), surely given enough time these patterns will also begin to change? Interested to hear what everyone thinks and if this were true, what it would mean for the conjecture.

I think there obviously needs to be a distinction made between "life" and "something that is conscious". Most agree that there will be life that isn't conscious, at least to a level where it's clearly distinguishable from non-conscious matter. Considering that all life basically came from self-replicating molecules with a capacity to imperfectly replicate occasionally (mutation), the least arbitrary definition of "life" I can think of is just a set of molecules with the capacity to self-replicate.

As for "consciousness" that's clearly a different matter. There are many theories on consciousness (try researching integrated information theory, Penrose-hameroff etc) that take a number of different approaches to the problem but one fact always remains missing. There's no way to quantify and measure consciousness, so how will we ever know what truly causes it? And how will we ever know if a certain system (an artificial intelligence for example) actually contains consciousness? It's quite impossible it seems to objectively measure a phenomenon which is purely subjective in its contents.

Therefore surely, the only way to verify if a system is conscious (with a reasonable degree of certainty) or not is to see if the system displays classic characteristics of something that would be considered 'alive' and to see if the system behaves in a similar matter to the one system we know is conscious- the brain. if these two boxes are ticked, we can assume the system is alive (although not its 100% certainty).

As a side note I think there are some interesting ethical implications to your question, if we were truly to come up with a way of determining whether something is alive or not, does that mean certain things will have different levels of 'aliveness' than others? What impact will this have on animal rights? Are they conscious enough so that the killing of them for food is morally wrong? What cutoff point do we set ourselves? Is it only ethically sound to kill something with 0 consciousness or do we set some arbitrary threshold level on the scale of consciousness to decide what's moral to kill and what's not? What about a foetus, is that conscious? What will that mean for abortion law? The possibilities are endless.

Very good question though.