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Liminal Space
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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Unless you go for Cartesian dualist theories about immaterial souls, consciousness of the sort we experience is an artefact of the structure of our brains and nervous systems, which are large in scale and complex. A small blob of human-derived brain tissue is not going to have consciousness, let alone self-awareness and a sense of horror at its predicament, any more than a 555 timer is capable of playing DOOM by virtue of being made of silicon.
Haha my first thought was "I wonder if it's possible to build a general purpose CPU out of 555 timers, then get DOOM running on that sucker."
Of course, someone has already taken the first steps towards such a monstrosity.
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/17/implementing-a-cpu-using-555-timers-and-logic-synthesis/
People build CPUs out of logic gates in Minecraft and Factorio.
Imagine the PCBA company's response
I don't think we can say that about consciousness for sure, but I agree with your broader point that it doesn't have self-awareness or a sense of horror at its predicament.
This could actually host a very interesting rudimentary form of consciousness that is theorized by some theories of consciousness, especially idealist models like panpsychism or analytic idealism (though I do admit that analytic idealism would phrase it in terms of having a mental state instead of being conscious).
There's also the question of why would it experience horror? It's not exactly in pain, and they way they make the eyes grow is just to add the hormone signal that makes eyes grow when developing.
So from its perspective, it just got told to make eyes, so it has rudimentary eyes now. Hardly the most horrifying existence.
If you follow an integrated information theory derivation, consciousness is emergent from integrating and partitioning information, and with no immaterial soul the possible capability of awareness remains, even if not directly comparable to our own.
Give that brain some morphine as a treat to be on the safe side, most brains find that one relaxing.
Morphine is fine, but please do not put the brain into a robotic spider suit and especially do not add a machine gun to said robotic spider suit.
Best take here. When not otherwise engaged by an experiment, show that lil glob the best time it's capable of experiencing
I get what you’re saying, but DOOM can run on anything.
So...step 2 is figuring out how many cells are needed to run DOOM on wetware?
Some people are already working on that: https://youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw
At what point do brain cells develop the complexity for consciousness? Is there a specific number of brain cells which produces self-awareness?
I have a difficult time believing that consciousness is some artifact that arises from material “complexity and structure”, and tend towards the nondual view of reality.
But that is just my opinion, and what makes consciousness such a fascinating subject imo.
If you were to think of each of us as a bank of servers, that would be the equivalence of a nightlight with a light sensor
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that someone has hacked a single 555 all the way into playing Doom...