Where is your example of non living consciousness, where is your example of computational consciousness, for us to examine? I'm waiting.
Was flight impossible before the Wright brothers? If a group of leading physicists did all the math associated with aerodynamics and proclaimed flight possible, but no airplanes existed yet, would you try to claim that birds had magic powers?
I am happy to agree with this, provided the brain is in a fully functioning organism. Which material specifically performs the computation?
The neurons, via electric impulses. This is a simplified summary - hormones and other chemicals play a role, primarily via inhibiting or allowing the neural impulses - but that is the basic idea.
Let me jump to the chase here, I agree that computation occurs somewhere in the brain, but how do we know that something else in the brain is not required to generate the conscious being, who makes use of the processing power provided by that computation.
"Yes, we know that the brain is a computer, and there are a lot of promising theories about how that computation results in consciousness, and we're making great strides in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience daily, but it
might be magic."
That's all you have. It's all you've ever had.
I repeat your evidence, is only evidence of the degrees to which damaged, dis-functional bodies result in various degrees of disfunction.
This is flatly wrong, on top of being a rather transparent attempt to hand-wave away the evidence mentioned.
Remove the parts of the brain which demonstrably perform the computations associated with consciousness and consciousness ceases. Cut the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain and you end up with two distinct instances of consciousness.
Yes, dysfunctional bodies are dysfunctional. Dysfunctional
brains result in dysfunctional
consciousness. This is an incredibly important piece of evidence, and you can't just hand-wave it away so simply.
Beyond that, this is far from the only piece of evidence. In this thread alone we've been over the fact that we can interpret the computations taking place in the brain multiple times. Anything that is generally considered to be part of the conscious mind
comes from the brain.
The only reason that this hasn't completely shut you down is because you're using a nonsensical definition of consciousness that no one else agrees with, and which is only vaguely defined at the best of times. Again, the moment an actual concrete definition appears, your position collapses.
Yes I agree with this position, but I go a little further.
"I agree that applying fire to dynamite makes it explode, but I go a bit further and postulate that applying fire to
anything will make it explode."
I see your point now, but it has an essential weakness, it presumes that humanity is in a position to answer ontological questions and renders the reality out there (beyond the human mind) subject to human thought. Talk about arrogance
No. No, it does not. It just stops people from making stupid, meaningless claims like "there's an invisible incorporeal undetectable dragon in my garage", "gravity is actually magic leprechauns moving things around", or "reality is actually just an illusion".
Putting an end to pointless games that rely on people not understanding what the words "is" or "exist" mean is not presumptuous. You might not personally
like that saying things like that holds no meaning, but I'm not here to play word games. I quite like fiction in its place - I write rather a lot of it - and ideas like this are
entertaining, but there is a difference between fantasy and reality.
As a side note, statements like this are... not exactly a pet peeve of mine, but something that I can't help but roll my eyes in response to. Really. There is no such thing as the entirely unknowable. If it can't be known, ever, by anyone, under any circumstances, then it isn't true. It's a garage dragon.
You are a proponent of the theory but you can't give a summary of it? You either understand it or you don't. What is the problem?
There isn't any problem. I'm just saying no.
I already linked you to the paper defining the theory written by the man who came up with it. If you have any comments, you can address the actual theory, rather than trying to make other users jump through hoops for you so that the conversation can get mired in arguments over minutiae in the summary given.
