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Is Seeing Sunset the Same as Being Aware that You are Seeing Sunset?

Is Seeing Sunset the Same as Being Aware that You are Seeing Sunset?

Recently, I have been reading about different philosophical ideas. A common topic today for people who like to worry about the future is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The idea of a machine that can do everything a human can.

We can imagine a machine that sees a sunset, describes it, and even mimics the expressions of someone moved by beauty.

However, this raises a question about the gap between processing data and actually having a life. Is seeing sunset the same thing as being aware that you are seeing sunset?

A machine can see colors by processing signal; it calculates the exact shades of orange and pink. If the goal is to navigate the world or identify a tree, the processing is enough. But is there a difference between the data stream and knowing? One could argue that seeing is just a physical reaction while awareness of seeing is a separate, possibly redundant, event.

In philosophy, this is the distinction between information and Qualia - the red color and subjective redness of red color. It is the difference between a security camera recording a burglary and the homeowner actually being there to feel the heart palpitations. Both the systems "saw" the event, but only one is bothered by the fact that it saw it.

The Dead Server Paradox

This brings up a scenario I find particularly amusing.

Imagine a powerful Minecraft server running in a data center. Inside the server, the world is fully alive. Redstone contraptions are clicking, villagers are roaming, crops are growing and the sun is rising and setting over the blocky mountains.

But there is a catch. No one is logged in. There are no players and no one is looking at the screen.

On a technical level, the server is working. But does that Minecraft world actually exist in any meaningful way if there is no player to walk through the village? If our world is just a collection of atoms bumping into each other because the laws of physics told them to, we are essentially living in an empty server. Things happen, but there is no one to witness them.

Is Being Aware Really Required?

This is the most annoying part. If we look at it purely from perspective of survival, it is remarkbly hard to prove that being aware is even necessary.

Think of P-Zombie (Philosophical Zombie). This is a hypothetical creature humans imagined ever before AI was a thing. It is physically identical to a human. It eats, sleeps, works and even complains about the weather. But it has zero internal experience. You do not technically need to be aware of feeling hunger to eat; you just need a sensor to trigger a "seek food" function when "energy levels" are low.

Three Ways to Explain Awarness

There are three main ways people try to explain awareness:

  1. Physicalism - Awareness is just a byproduct of brain. It is not a "thing". The brain gives us a summary of what is hapenning so we can navigate the world without crashing into walls.

  2. Emergentism - Awarness is a feature that appeared once our brains got complex enough. It is still physical, but it serves a higher functional purpose.

  3. Dualism - Awareness is the only part that matters. Like a player finally logging into that empty Minecraft server, an observer is what makes the world "important".

TLDR; The physical world is just a background process running on a server no one asked for. And awarness is the only reason worth building the server in the first place.