Comment by donkeybeer
5 hours ago
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.
5 hours ago
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.
That's the point in contention, how to go from "electrical and chemical signals" (the quantities, mole, charge, mass, momentum, coulomb, spin) to qualities (emotions, perception, first-person perspective, private inner life, subjectivity). The jump you are making is the woo part: we have no in-principle avenue to explain this gap, so accepting it is a religious move. There is no evidence of such directed causal link, yet it is (generally) accepted on faith. If you think there is a logical and coherent way to resolve the so called "hard problem of consciousness" which doesn't result in a category error, we are all ears. The Nobel committee is too.
I agree that claiming that rocks are conscious on account of them being physical systems, like brains are, is at the very least coherent. However you would excuse if such claim is met with skepticism, as rock (and CPUs) don't look like brains at all, as long as one does not ignore countless layers of abstractions.
You can't argue for rationality and hold materialism/physicalism at the same time.
2 replies →