• Somebody has described how you get qualia?

    Well, perhaps not thoroughly enough to form instructions to build a ghost in the machine, but I thought Hofstadter gave it a red-hot go in Gödel, Escher, Bach back in the day. As he has it, in a nutshell, awareness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system of nested feedback loops. This notion is kind of reinforced by the fact that your thinking becomes more intelligent as you get more self-referential and meta about it; thinking about thinking leads to better thinking.

    A heater with a thermostat can be said to have an extremely crude awareness; keep adding layers of feedback enough times and you get a person.

  • That last paragraph seems to ring true
    Have worked with some people who appeared about as sentient as a Worcester Bosch

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