Comment by feoren
14 hours ago
It is clear that consciousness is independent of the substrate if you don't believe in magic.
We could make a very dumb biological calculator out of a few genetically-engineered neurons that would very obviously not be conscious.
It's still an open question if we can embed consciousness in our current microchips if we had enough of them together (which I think we currently don't), or if it requires some other physical process we don't fully understand, e.g. quantum. I strongly doubt it does require any quantum shenanigans, but even if it did, we can and will find all sorts of ways to make computers that can perform those shenanigans too. Eventually we're just going to stop being able to move the goalposts, unless you set those goalposts in magic-land.
Quantum physics isn’t shenanigans, it’s completely fundamental and necessary to the brain and its electrochemistry. To say “yes but we can create a model of the brain which doesn’t need all that, we can model the classical physics or a reduced set of quantum interactions (running classically)” and then model the brains neurons on a computational substrate, well this is going to be nothing like the brain so won’t give you the result you’re looking for.
And say what you want about meat but we don’t seem to find consciousness in rocks or plants or clouds or hairdryers. And the buddists report that some very strange things happen if you meditate for years on end but obviously they must be talking shit and making it up because it’s not testably scientific.
Are you familiar with these things called emulators?
Totally agree. There's nothing magical about meat.
Why always the strawman about "magic" or "supernatural" in these debates? The universe can be natural without it being fundamentally physical or functional. We don't know that consciousness is functional, in fact one could argue consciousness is the one thing that isn't captured by functional explanations. Because when you explain how a brain functions, the experiential part is left out and just assumed since we have brains that have experiences. So obviously there is a correlation. But we don't know that this correlation exists for anything functionally equivalent. We don't know that consciousness can be simulated.
My view is physical, functional, mathematical and informational explanations are abstractions from shared experiences. Abstractions remove the experiential aspect to arrive at something objective so we can understand the world around us, since experiences are creature and to some extent, individually dependent. This is Nagel's ultimate point in What It's Like to Be A Bat paper about the objective/subjective divide. And probably related to Kant's argument about phenomena vs the noumena outside experience. We try to understand reality via abstraction.
And it has nothing to do with magic. It's an epistemological situation we find ourselves in, which may or may not tell us something fundamental about the world. Depends on your metaphysical assumptions as to what can fundamentally exist.