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<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter · HackerPapers discussions</title><link>https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/</link><description>Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.</description><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMT</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — mentioned by garmaine</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21405409</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:1401.1219:21405409</guid><pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2019 03:12:42 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;I never said there was broad consensus among all philosophers and physicists, etc. It takes generations for these ideas to truly die, just as it did with other widely believed falsehoods. No one really attacked consciousness from a mechanistic perspective until Turing, and that work wasn&amp;#x27;t followed up on outside of the AI community until the 70&amp;#x27;s and 80&amp;#x27;s, and it wouldn&amp;#x27;t be until very recent advances in AI that others took these philosophical ideas originating from computer science seriously. So in the philosophy of physics and the mind, there are whole departments filled with tenured…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039012</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:1401.1219:19039012</guid><pubDate>Wed, 30 Jan 2019 20:20:26 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Consciousness as a State of Matter (2015)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;49 points; 73 discussion replies on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — mentioned by leepowers</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244156</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:1401.1219:15244156</guid><pubDate>Thu, 14 Sep 2017 01:02:49 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;To be pedantic - that would only show that consciousness is non-neuronal. Max Tegmark has this idea of &amp;quot;consciousness as a state of matter&amp;quot;[1] - that neurons aren&amp;#x27;t particularly special - what matters is are particular patterns. These consciousness patterns can be composed of neurons, but they could also be composed of computer circuits, or rain drops, or any other particles.[2] To be pragmatic - the absence of a physical cause for consciousness does not preclude any other causes. Whatever environment consciousness exists in that environment must have rules, laws, constants, and symmetries…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — mentioned by jes5199</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842861</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:1401.1219:14842861</guid><pubDate>Mon, 24 Jul 2017 21:26:20 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;relatedly, Max Tegmark tried to do some estimates of Phi values of neural networks in his paper &amp;quot;Consciousness as a State of Matter&amp;quot; https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf And while he seems to take IIT pretty seriously, his conclusion sure seems like a refutation of the idea that IIT&amp;#x27;s definition of Phi means anything: &amp;gt; Information stored in Hopfield neural networks is naturally error-corrected, but 10^11 neurons support only about 37 bits of integrated information. This leaves us with an integration paradox: why does the information content of our conscious experience appear to be vastly…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192946</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:1401.1219:14192946</guid><pubDate>Tue, 25 Apr 2017 12:50:27 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;76 points; 52 discussion replies on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — mentioned by dantillberg</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808479</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:1401.1219:10808479</guid><pubDate>Tue, 29 Dec 2015 19:20:51 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;This doesn&amp;#x27;t sound much like a physics paper from the abstract (http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219). &amp;quot;why do conscious observers like us perceive...&amp;quot; is an appropriate angle for philosophical discussion (or maybe psychology, depending on where you took that). But in physics, we use experimentation and observation of the physical world. Put a brain (or a human) on a table, do some experiments, and write about the results. If you find that atoms and molecules in the brain do strange things that they don&amp;#x27;t do when part of a brain, document, publish, and theorize. And if you don&amp;#x27;t do any experiments…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — mentioned by telotortium</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10805796</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:mention:1401.1219:10805796</guid><pubDate>Tue, 29 Dec 2015 08:33:52 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#x27;t realize at first that the Physics arXiv blog was the author of this post. Here&amp;#x27;s the link to the abstract: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and discussion history&lt;/a&gt;. A mention is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8266266</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:1401.1219:8266266</guid><pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2014 01:04:01 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Consciousness as a State of Matter [pdf]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;2 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7672901</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:1401.1219:7672901</guid><pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:49:13 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Consciousness as a State of Matter&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;2 points; 2 discussion replies on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7569174</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:1401.1219:7569174</guid><pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2014 19:43:18 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;New theory of Consciousness: As a different state of matter (By Max Tegmark-MIT)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item><item><title>Consciousness as a State of Matter — HN submission</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024651</link><guid isPermaLink="false">urn:hackerpapers:submission:1401.1219:7024651</guid><pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2014 16:54:22 GMT</pubDate><description>&lt;p&gt;Consciousness as a State of Matter&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;94 points; 134 discussion replies on HN. &lt;a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1401.1219/"&gt;Paper and source history&lt;/a&gt;. A submission is not an endorsement.&lt;/p&gt;</description><category>quant-ph</category></item></channel></rss>
