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#5934·Dennis Hackethal, 3 days agoThere’s also continuity in how MacBooks process information over the years, and how their hardware evolved, including ‘sensory processing’ like their cameras and microphones, yet none of them are sentient/conscious, and if one became conscious tomorrow, it would have nothing to do with its hardware and everything to do with its software.
I think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.
As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.
Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.
So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.