Will artificial intelligence give blockchain consciousness?

Source: Blockworks; Compiled by Wuzhu, Golden Finance

"Consciousness might eventually appear in very strange places."

——Christoph Koch

A classic question in the philosophy of mind was posed by Thomas Nagel in 1974: "What is it like to be a bat?"

Nagel's view is that the definition of consciousness is merely the feeling of being something—an inner, subjective, alive, and conscious experience.

He explained: "A living organism has a state of mind with consciousness if and only if there is a certain sensation, it is as if it becomes that organism."

Many people think this subjective answer is a repetitive cycle that is unsatisfactory: what is it???

David Chalmers later referred to this issue as the "hard problem of consciousness" because it reveals the gap between subjective experience and objective science.

However, in 2004, Giulio Tononi published a paper proposing a mathematical model of consciousness: Integrated Information Theory (IIT), in response to Chalmers' problem.

He believes that consciousness is a mathematical property of physical systems - something that can be quantified and measured.

But, can a system have consciousness?

After interviewing computational neuroscientist Christoph Koch, the co-hosts of the New Scientist podcast concluded that a computer, as a system, could theoretically achieve consciousness if it could "integrate" the information it processes.

Almost anything can constitute a system: even a rock, if its atoms are arranged in the correct structure, may possess a hint of consciousness (as demonstrated in the scientific documentary "Everything Has Its Time").

This reminds me: Ethereum is a world computer, right?

Critics accuse Bitcoin of being just a pet rock.

So... if computers and rocks can have consciousness, can blockchain certainly have it too?

In fact, blockchain does meet many of the requirements of IIT.

For example, IIT posits that a system possesses consciousness only when its current state reflects everything it has experienced—just as your memories shape you, and each moment is built upon the previous one.

Blockchains like Ethereum operate in a similar way: the current "state" of the blockchain depends on its history, and each new block is entirely reliant on the blocks that came before it.

This reliance on history gives it a certain memory—and because thousands of nodes reach consensus on a single shared version of reality, it also creates a unified "now" (or "state"), which IIT considers a characteristic of consciousness.

Unfortunately, IIT also believes that for a system to possess consciousness, it must have "causal autonomy"—that is, its various parts must interact with each other internally, rather than merely responding passively to inputs from external participants.

Of course, blockchain does not operate this way.

In contrast, they rely on external inputs (such as users sending transactions and validators adding blocks) to take action and progress—the nodes running the network do not influence each other internally; they simply follow the same set of rules blindly.

No spontaneous activity, no internal causal relationships—there isn't even the aimless molecular vibrations of a lifeless granite.

Therefore, I regret to report that within the scope of IIT awareness, the ranking of blockchain is even lower than that of a rock—thus, the nickname "pet rock" may be a compliment to Bitcoin (or an insult to the rock).

But this situation may not last long!

In 2021, computer scientists (couple) Lenore Bloom and Manuel Bloom co-authored a paper describing how to integrate consciousness into machines.

Their framework regards consciousness as a computable attribute that can be realized through artificial intelligence algorithms designed to construct systems with the necessary "causal autonomy" for conscious experience.

In this case, the artificial intelligence itself may not possess consciousness, but the system deploying it may.

Now imagine a blockchain empowered by artificial intelligence that not only runs code but also thinks about how to run the code.

Blockchain is no longer a passive and rigid ledger waiting for input; rather, it can become a self-sufficient, "causal-integrated" machine – it is less of a distributed database and more like an artificial brain, possessing the kind of internal autonomy that researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) believe is crucial for consciousness.

This could be very useful!

Such a system may be able to reason about its own security, detect anomalies in real-time, and decide when to self-fork (perhaps after a period of deep reflection).

In short, it acts not because it is told to, but because it understands what is happening - whether internally or in the external world.

This is not impossible.

Today's blockchain resembles a neural system without a brain—neural connections without will.

But what about tomorrow? Who knows.

If the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are correct, philosophers may soon ask, "What does it feel like to be a blockchain?"

(And is it better than being a stone?)