Does technological advancement represent evolution of consciousness?

[5 Dimensional Nick]

I have read arguments against this on the Nexus. The best was one that stated that circuits and logic gates can be represented with pipe/stream contraption, which I believe is how some of the earlier computational machines were implemented. So if we could program an artificially intelligent 'machine' using digital circuits, then one could also be made with enough steam pipes, and this doesn't seem feasible.

These people have failed to realise that there is no possible proof of consciousness, external to ones own mind. A rock could be conscious, people un-conscious zombies! Whose to say you couldn't create a self-aware system from steam pipes. The definition of consciousness is too fleeting and impossible to nail down with logic.

 

[5 Dimensional Nick]

Consciousness on the other hand (or self-awareness), hard to say. Sometimes I entertain the notion that everything is conscious, and that consciousness is like a kind of field that permeates all existence.

I was blown off my chair the day I realised that it is not that space and time are the fundamental units of reality that consciousness emerges from, but that the original fabric of the universe was consciousness and space-time emerges from it.