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. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> ccs > -- 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/CAJPayv0isx-ke68JeSRsTWiXUOq2wpLNuR9fE%3Ds3f_QEP3pVGg%40mail.gmail.com.
