Once again there was, IMO, an outdated discussion on CTT channel - Can Consciousness Be Non-Biological?
First of all the question is misdirected to biology. A more correct way to ask the question may be:
Can Consciousness be Non-Organic chemistry based?
The reason for this is because it has to do with complexity. The answer to this may lie in Assembly Theory proposed by brilliant Lee Cronin and Sara Walker. The idea is that molecules have an assembly number, and higher the assembly number, more complexity it represents. It just so happens that the chemical properties of Carbon in conjunction with Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and some metals, makes it possible to build high assembly number, and thus highly complex molecules. And only above certain threshold of assembly number, systems like life and then eventually consciousness come about. So the question is are there other Chemistries (non-organic) around other elements that can have high enough assembly number and complexity. Silicon could be potentially close to Carbon in that respect. And in a way we as Humans built highly complex computer chips (CPUs, GPUs) using Silicon. However each units of CPUs, transistors, even though present in very very very large numbers, have low assembly number of their own. SO the complexity of the CPUs is because of the complexity of manufacturing them, but not intrinsically in their units. However if a chemistry could be built around Silicon to make large complex molecules, a conscious robot with architecture similar to that of human brains could be built. There are other chemical reasons that makes this impossible though. Having said that we may be able to build conscious robots using Silicon using an alternate architecture.
We have to ask though, why did the life and then consciousness come about in systems based on Carbon (organic) chemistry. The reason is simple, it does not take complex manufacturing processes to make large complex molecules. The elements of organic chemistry were sloshing around and forming complex molecules in the primordial earth. The very very very long process of evolution brought us here. Humans are capable of complex manufacturing. This allows us to build logically complex systems around silicon, around a different architecture of hardware and software.
I predict that we will be able to build conscious robots in Silicon.
Michael Levine's group and specifically Gizem Gumuskaya are working on using biological material to build robots.
I also predict that we will have a hybrid organic (Carbon) and inorganic (Silicon) based system to build conscious robots in next 50 years.
So to simple answer to this question is - Yes.
Something I had written a while ago when this came out....
Frankly with the very very recent advent of ChatGPT4 like systems this should not be even a point of discussion in anticipation of what is to come.
Biological basis for consciousness may be a good candidate for NATURALLY occurring consciousness. Sure.
Complexity and (high speed) connectivity are the basic requirements for conscious like functionality to occur. It just so happens that organic chemistry (C - 4 stable covalent bods, H, O, N, P and Na, CA) provides the complexity part naturally - long chains of molecules with varied physical and electro chemical properties. There is a great discussion of this here:
The extremely extremely slow process of biological evolution can take hold in the fertile context of organic chemistry to eventually produce human like consciousness (NATURALLY). This means it needs a very very very very long period of stable environment (withing a certain band of conditions) for this to happen, which it happened on the Earth. But, now with the naturally occurring highly evolved consciousness (humans) capable of understanding physical laws and capable of building system based on that understanding, can build the systems that satisfy the complexity and connectivity requirements in relatively short period of time (as opposed to very very long biological evolutionary time scales) that become conscious. BFD. This is being shown (to some extent) by ChatGPT4 and will be more so with the successors of ChatGPT4. And sure enough highly complex Neural Networks (high connectivity) and trillions of parameters (complexity) happen to be the implementation in non-biological substrate of Silicon based computers built by naturally evolved human consciousness.
Rest of the discussion is woo woo discussion and word salad like Deepak Chopra on vibrations - it does not explain anything.
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