That structure resembles our brain: a reactive, resilient, shifting network of connections among billions of individual human brains using smartphones and other technological devices, storing, aggregating and routing information in complex and arbitrary ways. If consciousness is to be found in our technology, I wouldn't look at the individual smartphone, but at the network of all smartphones.
Large networks, e.g. the brain or the Internet, on the other hand, are exponentially more complex and so offer the possibility of being unexplainable when looking at certain behaviors. A recursive problem in a sense.
Emphasis on _a_ human.
I've heard that there's so many layers of abstraction and obfuscation, that there is no one person who can explain thoroughly every layer of a modern computer, from the volts in the bits, to the web front end, through the cloud.
(Physicalists such as Daniel Dennett [and myself] deny that there is such a problem--that dualists like David Chalmers are operating off of erroneous intuitions, not sound arguments.)
I’d be surprised if there is anything that it’s like to be a smartphone, or even an AI running in a smartphone, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.
What does the word "consciousness" mean in that sentence, and why are the simplest of life forms excluded? What test do we apply that all organisms pass, except for the simplest life forms, which fail?
Only tangentially related... the podcast "Everything is Alive" is really enjoyable. The host interviews a variety of everyday objects: a can of soda, a magic eight ball, a towel, a song, etc.
The first episode, "Louis, Can of Cola", is my favorite.
Thus is the nature of the feedback loop.
I'm never letting my phone battery drain again.
It raises many questions, among them the ethics of putting such beings to sleep, or restoring them from a previous checkpoint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...
Full text of the novella:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130306030242/http://subterrane...
There's not really a better analog in biology. Even in the case of sexual reproduction, the new life carries tons of epigenetic state across the creation boundary, and is more akin to fork(2) than exec(2).
A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me.
Saying my laptop is "asleep" when it's suspended is verbally cromulent, no one would be confused by what I meant. But the metaphor breaks down badly on any attempt to extend it.
Even if I brick it, I have the option to purchase fresh equipment and restore from the most recent backup. If my timing is good, there may be no difference from my perspective.
This isn't possible with living things, and it might not even be possible, the fond dreams of mind-upload enthusiasts notwithstanding.
but some state is preserved in non-volatile memory.
I can't think of any biological analogy for that. If/when there is a mechanism to save and restore the state of a human mind, we will have to add more nuance to how we talk about dying.
To summarize the cutting edge state of understanding of consciousness,: "We don't know".
I'm not saying this isn't a fun little question to think about, but from the perspective of advancing knowledge, it's premature, and assumes an answer to a whole lot of questions.
The problem with these definitions is that they require wide-spread agreement to be considered valid explanations.
The Anime
Daniel Dennett and others have shown that this is not generally true. Nagel's arguments have been repeatedly refuted, so they are not a good foundation for an argument.
