Does AI think about blockchain?

The standard question in the philosophy of consciousness was raised by Thomas Nagel in 1974. “What is it like to be a bat?”

Nagel’s idea was that consciousness was simply defined by what feels like something: the inner subjective experience of living and perceived.

“A living thing has a conscious state of mind only when there is something like that being,” he explained.

I have discovered that many people are circulating this subjective answer in frustration: what is this something???

David Chalmers declared the question a “difficult question of consciousness” because he revealed the gap between subjective experience and objective science.

However, in 2004, Giulio Tonony confronted Chalmer’s difficult problem in his paper proposing a mathematical model for consciousness: Integrated Information Theory (IIT).

He says that consciousness is a mathematical property of a physical system, something that can be quantified and measured.

But a system Are you aware of it?

After interviewing computational neuroscientist Christof Koch, the co-host of the new Scientist Podcast concluded that the system, the computer, can theoretically achieve consciousness if it can “integrate” the information being processed.

And almost anything can become a system. Even rocks may register traces of consciousness if atoms form the correct type of structure (proven in scientific documentaries) Everything is at once anywhere).

That made me think: Ethereum is the computer of the world, right?

Critics have accused Bitcoin of pet rock.

So… if computers and rocks are conscious, then certainly could blockchain too?

In fact, blockchain checks a lot of IIT boxes.

For example, we assume that the system can only be aware if the current state reflects everything it is experiencing.

Blockchains like Ethereum work in a similar way. The current “state” of a blockchain is a function of its history, with new blocks completely dependent on each previous one.

That history dependence gives it a kind of memory – and also creates that the unified “now” (or “state”) that IIT calls is a feature of consciousness, as thousands of nodes agree with the reality of a single shared version.

Unfortunately, IIT also states that the system needs to have “causal autonomy” in order for it to be aware of. That is, the part must affect the internally, depending on the input it receives passively from the outside actor.

Of course, blockchain doesn’t work that way.

Instead, they rely on external inputs (such as transactions that add blocks or users who send validators).

There is no voluntary activity or internal causality. Not even the aimless vibration of the molecules obtained in the inanimate mass of granite.

Therefore, in the IIT spectrum of consciousness, we are sorry to report that blockchains are ranked below rocks, and that the “pet lock” jab may be a complement to Bitcoin (or insults on rocks).

But it probably won’t be long!

In 2021, computer scientists (and married couples) Lenore and Manuel Blum co-authored a paper explaining how to design consciousness into a machine.

Their framework treats consciousness as a computational property. This is accomplished with AI algorithms designed to generate systems with the “causal autonomy” required for conscious experience.

In this case, AI is not itself, it is the system that deploys it.

Now imagine an AI-enabled blockchain, not just running code. I’ll think about it Execution code.

Instead of an inactive ledger that is passively waiting for input, blockchain could be a self-contained, “causally integrated” machine, like a synthetic brain, than a distributed database, with internal autonomy that IIT researchers consider to be essential to consciousness.

This is convenient!

Such a system could reason about its own security, detect anomalies in real time, and decide when to fork itself (probably after a period of introspection looking for the soul).

In short, it’s not because it was said, got it What was going on – both the inside and outside world.

It’s not impossible.