[anon-3988]

> On the other hand, the hypothesis that a Turing machine on its own could generate conscious experiences leads to many seemingly absurd scenarios. Notably, one has to ask how a simulation of supposedly conscious Turing machine using pen and paper could possibly be conscious, or indeed, why one would need to "run" a Turing machine for consciousness to arise and why a mere description of it would not suffice.

Applying this logic, heat is also fundamentally mysterious. What even is heat? Heat definitely exists, but is a mere description of it enough? If I run the simulation of a universe with heat; is that heat?

[anonymouszx]

I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's a fundamental difference between such physical concepts, which I can ultimately describe mathematically (at various scales and levels of accuracy), and conscious experiences.

For instance, I can sensibly ask "what's it like to be a cat?". But "what's it like to be a rock?", or "to be a hot rock?", or "a cold rock?" doesn't make much sense since there's presumably nothing that it's like to be a rock regardless of its temperature.

[anon-3988]

> I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's a fundamental difference between such physical concepts, which I can ultimately describe mathematically (at various scales and levels of accuracy), and conscious experiences.

You can describe heat mathematically the same way you can describe the interactions of every atoms in a brain mathematically but neither yields/explains why it is the way it is. It just is.

> For instance, I can sensibly ask "what's it like to be a cat?". But "what's it like to be a rock?", or "to be a hot rock?", or "a cold rock?" doesn't make much sense since there's presumably nothing that it's like to be a rock regardless of its temperature.

I don't understand this analogy. What you are doing is ultimately putting a mirror on yourself. You and I have no idea what it is like to be each other. In fact, I would argue you don't even know "what its like to be yourself from 1 day ago". You will ultimately be just reflecting your own current experience unto your supposedly previous self.

So, "what its like to be a rock". I don't know. Concsiousness is just that mysterious. If you lay out an array of iterations of my body. Where i=0 is my whole body, and i=1 is my body minus 1 atom, and this goes on up to N of my atoms. Then at what index does conscious stop and start? To say that a rock and an atom to not have a consciousness (however different/miniscule in experience they are) is to put hard wall at some index K on this array. I just don't think that's true.

[anonymouszx]

>You can describe heat mathematically the same way you can describe the interactions of every atoms in a brain mathematically but neither yields/explains why it is the way it is.

My whole argument was that I don't think one can describe the interactions of every atoms in the brain in a computable form. But actually, I would go further and say they likely can't even be described mathematically.

If this sounds crazy, consider that most mathematical objects are not describable (i.e. can't be singled out). For instance, most real numbers cannot even be imagined, and this stems from the fact that we can only describe things in a finite number of symbols, i.e. in bijection with the set of natural numbers, which is (infinitely) smaller than the set of real numbers.

>I don't understand this analogy.

This wasn't an analogy but an example to show the fundamental distinction between nonconcsious things, which can be dissected, described mathematically, and simulated (although it might be possible for something to be nonconscious and noncomputable at the same time, but we have no reason to believe that such things exist), and conscious things, which, at least in some very small part of them, cannot.

As for a rock being conscious or not, I choose to assume it's not for simplicity and because that seems sensible, but I'm not totally against panpsychism in principle.

[slowmovintarget]

Heat is not at all "fundamentally mysterious." We know exactly what it is, how and why it occurs, and how it will change over time.

We don't know any of those things with regard to consciousness.

Granted, the answer to your last question is a resounding "no," but we can say that because we know exactly what "heat" is.