Comment by svara
7 days ago
> My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.
A bit like asking "Have you proven that ice cream? Are you sure maths can not prove that ice cream? Do you have empirical evidence?"
Asking for empirical evidence seems beside the point, since the issue is a logical one.
As far as we know math can describe all of physics and sufficiently complex physics could describe our brains, thus math could describe our brains. Does that mean we aren't conscious? Where is the chain broken?
There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step:
How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?
Maybe I misunderstood you. You said this:
> A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.
Which I took to mean, people who think it's possible for math to result in consciousness is a "type error".
You gave this in response to:
> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
So overall I'm confused what you actually believe and what you think is the "type error" here.
Maybe you meant that emperical proof is not possible. Which seems obvious, which is (I think) entirely the point of asking that rhetorical question: they know no one has had the emperical proof required to suggest consciousness doesn't arrive from math.
In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain.
If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.
What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true but also completely irrelevant to anything that the sims do.
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