Comment by namero999
5 hours ago
I might be misunderstanding GP but I take it to mean "rock are conscious" => "silicon is conscious" => "agents are conscious", which might appeal to some uneducated audience, and create fascination around these stochastic parrots. Which is obviously ridiculous because its premises are still rooted in physicalism, which failed hard on its face to account for anything even tangentially related to subjectivity (which has nothing to do with the trivial mainstream conception of "soul").
I looked up physicalism, it sounds perfectly normal? What else exists that isn't physical and why can't we call that a soul or the supernatural? By definition since its supposedly not physical. We haven't yet found anything non physical in the universe, why this strange belief that our brains would be non physical?
Since it's an old debate that a lot of smart people spent a lot of time thinking about, the best short / simple answer you'll see for it is "you might want to read some more about it". A few keywords here are qualia, perception, descartes and the evil deceiver, berkeley and immaterialism, kant and synthetic a-priori, the nature of the reality of mathematical objects and mathematical truth, etc. If you think it's easy, for sure you have not understood the question yet.
I am glad I learned of all this philosophical background. But I am asserting most people who claim "rocks therefore not conscious" haven't thought through this and are doing this based on some unknown supernaturalism.
Why not, we are physical systems, computers are physical systems. If not soul, what is this magical non physical special sauce that makes us special and makes it easy to claim silicon is not conscious.
I don't know, you tell me: how do you _exactly_ go from quantities to qualities? Keep in mind that the "physical" is a model of our perception and nothing else.
What are quantities and qualities? Does exciting electrical and chemical signals in the brain and therefore inducing emotions or perceptions factor into this or is it out of scope? Or are you saying its more like a large scale state like heat in physics. If you what is it you seek beyond being able to identify the states associated with perceptions? If you are saying these "qualities" are non-verbal. Very well, do you mean non-verbal as not among the usual human languages like English, French, German, or do you mean in the most general sense as not representable by any alphabet set. We represent images, video, audio etc freely in various choices of alphabet daily on computers, so I am sure you didn't mean in that sense.