I've been pondering for a while a question that is exceedingly unlikely to ever be answered within my lifetime, because as a prerequisite it assumes a framework strong enough to answer several very hard questions in philosophy, neuroscience, and information theory. And that question is: Is it possible even in principle for a conscious entity to have an instinctual understanding and awareness of every low-level detail comprising its design?
> An extensive network of veins called a venous plexus are located on both sides of each of the lateral cartilages and in the sensitive structures of the hoof. The compression of these veins by the plantar cushion against the lateral cartilages or the coffin bone against the hoof acts as a “pump” to force the blood up the leg and back to the heart.
A horse is an extremely sophisticated biological machine, but it has no idea what makes itself tick. It has some limited mental model of the world around it and that's about it. Humans fare little better, but at least can make inch-by-inch progress through scientific study.
Such a creature that knew and felt itself perfectly, could at any point inquire the status of its own glycogen stores in its liver, could diagnose and micromanage its immune responses, could introspect accurately and with infinite recursion upon its own thoughts, seems hard to imagine, because if one were to set out to design such a creature, naturally its complexity would have to scale with the complexity it is attempting to self-model. Perhaps there is some sort of upper limit to the consciousness:complexity ratio that makes closing this gap impossible. (Or perhaps there isn't, and that would be just as fascinating.)
If nothing else, I would like to read a Borges story on the subject. Such a creature might inevitably be doomed to the same fate as Funes the Memorious.
> Is it possible even in principle for a conscious entity to have an instinctual understanding and awareness of every low-level detail comprising its design?
Access is possible, complexity limits what you can do with it.
It's like having a JTAG port on a chip with a lot of test access. You can read the state of most of the gates, but now you're overwhelmed with data. Processing that data takes more resources than the system being monitored.
At a larger scale, though, this starts to work. Modern industrial plants and cars have sensors all over the place, more than are really needed to operate the system. They're there to diagnose it.
> An extensive network of veins called a venous plexus are located on both sides of each of the lateral cartilages and in the sensitive structures of the hoof. The compression of these veins by the plantar cushion against the lateral cartilages or the coffin bone against the hoof acts as a “pump” to force the blood up the leg and back to the heart.
A horse is an extremely sophisticated biological machine, but it has no idea what makes itself tick. It has some limited mental model of the world around it and that's about it. Humans fare little better, but at least can make inch-by-inch progress through scientific study.
Such a creature that knew and felt itself perfectly, could at any point inquire the status of its own glycogen stores in its liver, could diagnose and micromanage its immune responses, could introspect accurately and with infinite recursion upon its own thoughts, seems hard to imagine, because if one were to set out to design such a creature, naturally its complexity would have to scale with the complexity it is attempting to self-model. Perhaps there is some sort of upper limit to the consciousness:complexity ratio that makes closing this gap impossible. (Or perhaps there isn't, and that would be just as fascinating.)
If nothing else, I would like to read a Borges story on the subject. Such a creature might inevitably be doomed to the same fate as Funes the Memorious.
Access is possible, complexity limits what you can do with it.
It's like having a JTAG port on a chip with a lot of test access. You can read the state of most of the gates, but now you're overwhelmed with data. Processing that data takes more resources than the system being monitored.
At a larger scale, though, this starts to work. Modern industrial plants and cars have sensors all over the place, more than are really needed to operate the system. They're there to diagnose it.