alt Hacker NewsForgive 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.
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Yes so that was my point, if we can agree that a molecular synthesis of a human being, being a pure naturalistic physical process is as good as any other human then if we assume some aphysical element to consciousness, then we have a purely physical process for achieving a system with aphysicality in it. Which means either its not in fact aphysical or then what, we are left with the quetion at what point during this assembly process this new special aspect arises.
It's my feeling that we are still getting too ahead of ourselves in judging some supernatural element, that it's much like the atomism question in ancient greece. An honest thinker back then could have no really firm reason to support one side over another and they tended toward thesse kinds of endless circular metaphysical discussions. That is until we had further data and observation tools which settled the question experimentally. Juat like certain aspects of consciousness, atomism felt an insolvable question in some ways back then. I feel the problems we will have with consciousness will eventually have a similar fate. This bet has always succeeded for millenia till now.
Eternal youth and experience machines don't seem like problems with any conceptual difficulties. We already know electrical and chemical signals change what the brain perceives and eger6nal youth is no more difficult a concept than making any other form of long lasting machine. Obviously there is a long sequence of research problems to solve in the line but none of it is conceptually impossible or blockaged.