Comment by prmph
5 days ago
> "quite robust against disturbances."
does not mean that the essential thing gives rise to consciousness is only approximate. To give an example from software, you can write software is robust against bad input, attempts to crash it, even bit flips. But, if I came in and just changed a single character in the source code, that may cause it to fail compilation, fail to run, or become quite buggy.
> If you don't want that to be true, you need some kind of magic,
This is just what I'm saying is a false dichotomy. The only reason some are unable to see beyond it is that we think the basic logic we understand are all there could be.
In this respect physics has been very helpful, because without peering into reality, we would have kept deluding ourselves that pure reason was enough to understand the world.
It's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a well educated person or scientist from the 16th century without the benefit of experimental evidence. No way they'd believe you. In fact, they'd accuse you of violating basic logic.
How is it a false dichotomy? If you want consciousness to NOT be simulateable, then you need some essential component to our minds that can't be simulated (call it soul or whatever) and for that thing to interface with our physical bodies (obviously).
We have zero evidence for either.
> does not mean that the essential thing gives rise to consciousness is only approximate
But we have 8 billion different instances that are presumably conscious; plenty of them have all kinds of defects, and the whole architecture has been derived by a completely mechanical process free of any understanding (=> evolution/selection).
On the other hand, there is zero evidence of consciousness continuing/running before or after our physical brains are operational.
> plenty of them have all kinds of defects,
Defects that have not rendered them unconscious, as long as they still are alive. You seem not to see the circularity of your argument.
I gave you an example to show that robustness against adverse conditions is NOT the same as internal resiliency. Those defect, as far as we know, are not affecting the origin of consciousness itself. Which is my point.
> How is it a false dichotomy? If you want consciousness to NOT be simulateable, then you need some essential component to our minds that can't be simulated (call it soul or whatever) and for that thing to interface with our physical bodies (obviously).
If you need two things to happen at the same time in sync with each other no matter if they are separated by billions of miles, then you need faster-than-light travel, or some magic [1]; see what I did there?
1. I.e., quantum entanglement
> If you need two things to happen at the same time in sync with each other no matter if they are separated by billions of miles, then you need faster-than-light travel, or some magic [1]; see what I did there?
No. Because even if you had solid evidence for the hypothesis that quantum mechanical effects are indispensable in making our brains work (which we don't), then that is still not preventing simulation. You need some uncomputable component, which physics right now neither provides nor predicts.
And fleeing into "we don't know 100% of physics yet" is a bad hypothesis, because we can make very accurate physical predictions already-- you would need our brains to "amplify" some very small gap in our physical understanding, and this does not match with how "robust" the operation of our brain is-- amplifiers, by their very nature, are highly sensitive to disruption or disturbances, but a human can stay conscious even with a particle accelerator firing through his brain.
> If you need two things to happen at the same time in sync with each other no matter if they are separated by billions of miles, then you need faster-than-light travel, or some magic [1]
This makes no sense as written - by definition, there is no concept of "at the same time" for events that are spacelike separated like this. Quantum entanglement allows you to know something about the statistical outcomes of experiments that are carried over a long distance away from you, but that's about it (there's a simpler version, where you can know some facts for certain, but that one actually looks just like classical correlation, so it's not that interesting on its own).
I do get the point that we don't know what we don't know, so that a radical new form of physics, as alien to current physics as quantum entanglement is to classical physics, could exist. But this is an anti-scientific position to take. There's nothing about consciousness that breaks any known law of physics today, so the only logical position is to suppose that consciousness is explainable by current physics. We can't go around positing unknown new physics behind every phenomenon we haven't entirely characterized and understood yet.
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