On Sun, 25 Jun 2023 at 13:23, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 24, 2023 at 5:45 PM 'spudboy...@aol.com' via Everything List < > everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote: > > > PHILOSOPHER V NEUROSCIENTIST. 1-0. > > >> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8 >> > > I'm not surprised that philosopher David Chalmers won the bet, but I am > surprised that Neuroscientist Christof Koch would make such a bet. Many > brilliant people have devoted their life to it but fundamental > consciousness research has achieved precisely nothing since the time of > Socrates, so what could've made Koch or any scientist conclude that we'd > have an empirically provable consciousness theory in 25 years? Recent > events have demonstrated that we have largely solved the intelligence > problem but consciousness is another matter entirely because there's no way > to test for it without making a lot of unprovable assumptions. That's not > to say I'm a fan of Chalmers, I'm not. > > Chalmers is most famous for insisting there is an easy and a hard > consciousness problem, the easy problem is explaining how the brain works > and produces intelligent behavior, and the hard problem is explaining how > those physical processes produce consciousness. But Chalmers is also a > great advocate of panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is not an all or > nothing thing and that everything, even a simple electron, has a nonzero > amount of consciousness; that's not too different from my view that > consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed > intelligently and is the brute fact that terminates a very long chain of > "why" questions. So if panpsychism is even close to being the truth then > the "hard" problem was solved long ago, but only very recently have we > begun to see the answer to the "easy" problem. Chalmers got the labels > wrong, he should've switched them. > Chalmers is also a great advocate of functionalism, the idea that a device that can copy the functional organisation of the brain, like a computer upload, will have whatever consciousness the brain has. He shows this through a reductio ad absurdum argument. Note that this does not require proof that brains or a particular brain is conscious, it is an argument that if the brain is conscious then so is the upload. > -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAH%3D2ypV0WgE%2B2wBWjiNKhOVTmH37WW%3Ds-JqTJCfTzVq1T6Jzpw%40mail.gmail.com.
