alt Hacker NewsAnd what part remains in that space after we have mapped all the brain signals and configurations corresponding to these feelings, intentions and perceptions? I don't feel the need to bring up absurd unproven concepts without waiting for more data. It'd be like me saying there is something aphysical behind Mercury's orbital perturbations if I were born before SR and GR were discovered (as an example). No point in jumping to such an argument without first exhausting more believable causes first. History is very strongly against any kind of bet in the aphysical.
My question to you would be, what do you think remains that's not a simple natural system if/after something like Neuralink is successfully established?
Forgive me if I ramble for too long. I've been seeing a lot of comments in this vein and the thoughts have accumulated.
Tacit in your question is the notion that the inquiries that are important are those that can result in predictive models of phenomena encountered in the world — hence feelings, intentions & perceptions turn into a shorthand for reported accounts of the same — and that given enough reports (data), we could build a dictionary that maps a bundle of reports to a(n equivalence class) of physical system(s).
But when we speak of having feelings, or acting on intentions, most often we are not using these as stand-ins for our failure to pin down the current state of our physical system to another. If I am exposed to fire, I want to get away — I am unconcerned with how well I could translate my report of the pain to a patterns of neural activations. The reality of pain for me is unaffected by the fidelity of my "experience report dictionary". And it is there whether it's a brush fire or a neuralink streaming fire bits to my cortex.
If you decide that primacy ought to always be given to things as they can be modeled, you can choose to elevate the "experience report dictionary" and make the reality of experience a second-class citizen. Then you end up with an eliminativist ontology where indeed, we can rightly be called a mechanism.
But that is a "world-making" decision, a value judgement: "this is how things should be seen". It might be sponsored by our recent history, where we got high on the fruits of applied scientific modelling, nursed by the education which taught us that being a good engineer can have us continue in line with that, and pushed on us by impoverished modern eschatologies promising eternal youth, experience machines and what-not at this point. And it might seem preferable or more dependable than whatever equally impoverished, inhumane eschatologies we may have been presented with before.
It doesn't mean there isn't a whole world of places where we can go instead. But in general, we don't change our value judgements until the current one seems inadequate for some reason.
> If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?
Sure.