this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Worm's brain mapped and replicated digitally to control obstacle-avoiding robot.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Can't, but I suspect not for the reason you're hoping. The consensus, at least among computational neurologists (the field that, among other things, studies how brains work mathematically), is that "consciousness" as a concrete thing isn't really... real. It's just a term humans created to loosely describe a phenomenon that arises from any sufficiently complex well-ordered network. If you want to know what it really looks like, you can run your own OpenWorm robot! The human 'mind' looks just like that, only around a dozen orders of magnitude more complex.

The problem is that you're asking mostly meaningless questions. Even the loose definitions of consciousness aren't definable to the 'atomic level' - a mind is a mathematical construct. It's like asking where the files on your computer live; I can point to the sectors of the harddrive where a program is encoded, or even hand you a really really massive stack of punched tape, but neither of those actually are the computer program. What we call the program is the interaction of a grammar consisting of logical rules and constants running within the linguistic and computational context of an automata. It's the same as with a mind - it's the abstract state of an unfathomably complex machine.