[logicallee]

It doesn't matter if you agree. Some of the world's 7 billion people likely believe that minds are like souls in a parallel ethereal plane and they could be severed, float around for a while, be attached to some other person and so forth. Regardless of whether anyone believes that it is just not true and conscienceness is an emergent propery of the person having it, and it doesn't really matter whether you or anyone else sees it that way.

It doesn't matter what you think conscienceness is or whether there is agreement on it. (Sorry if this is harsh.)

[SiddarthaBuddha]

How can you be so confident? You have no proof of this (or at least have not demonstrated it) and are simply going on faith which is exactly what someone who says that consciousness comes from the soul is doing.

And even if consciousness is an emergent property of the structure of the brain, how could we have a simulated brain report that it is experiencing consciousness when we cant define what it is in the first place?

[logicallee]

Suppose you couldn't define flight, and I said, of course flight is possible since birds fly so it would be possible to fly, flight is just the sum of the mechanical motions that it entails - whereas you claimed no, no, it's some kind of magic that Hermes, the god of flight deigns to imbue some creatures with. Even if you exactly copied every last muscle twitch in a bird with a mechanical version of the same, you claimed, there is no guarantee that Hermes would play along and magically make it fly, it could be an earthbound mechanical object, or even if it did appear to fly, since we don't have a good definition of flight how would we even know if it's really flying? It could just be appearing to fly but, since in our mythology Hermes doesn't make mechanical things fly, it really isn't flying...

it's not something that is even worth discussing. of course if you made an emulated version of a brain in a VR with the same structure and neurological action and it reported consciousness, then it would be conscious, of course, yes. This is like asking whether NES games can "really" be running in a browser, even if the browser is emulating an NES system and includes the code of the original cartridge. Is the game "really" running? Can you "really" play it? Meaningless questions. If the VR person with the same brain topology as a human and hundreds of billions of neurons reports consciousness then of course it has it. why would being emulated suddenly make it different from all 7 billion humans running natively in the world, especially if theoretically it could be compiled from the same source code (which we have a copy of, DNA was sequenced in full in the 90s).

Since my comment was about a thousand years out, there's no question and we don't need to discuss these things. It's open and shut. I don't need to give any citations.

[SiddarthaBuddha]

So let's say that perhaps biological neurons are an antenna which picks up on a universal consciousness energy field and imbues consciousness into a brain and that thus far, or even 1000 years from now, this property has gone undetected. Simulating the known properties of the brain may make a program that functions in all respects like a brain but does not have consciousness. It might report that it has consciousness because that is some function of another property of the simulation however in this case we would know that it is not true.

I find it amusing that you think a topic as widely studied and disputed as consciousness is "open and shut" because of some assumptions that you choose to make. Nonetheless, I do appreciate hearing your perspective so thank you.

[logicallee]

Yes, I may be butchering this (didn't read the link below) but perhaps in Descartes's philosophy the pineal gland is like a connection to the soul, sure, like an antenna to an ethereal world, in a physical organ.

I completely discount this possibility and think it's not worth discussing. So, you are right that my mind is very closed to any alternatives to what I've stated, though as in your example of an antenna, we could describe such alternatives rigorously. Not worth our time. (IMO). Thanks for the replies.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/

[zardo]

We would necessarily have a much better understanding of brains and consciousness if we were able to build a working brain simulation.