[The5thElephant]

I'm struggling to understand this argument. Our brain is just hardware. Even if there is a quantum effect we haven't discovered that is necessary for it, that effect is still running on regular old atoms and molecules. There is no inherent reason we couldn't just add that effect to our metal and silicon computers.

Those atoms and molecules may just be bits of information themselves in some higher order computer. But there is nothing inherently "magical" about consciousness other than its uniqueness.

Heck there are fairly convincing arguments for pan-consciousness where it is a fundamental part of any set of information and is simply as complex as that information system. If you have a highly complex, self referential information system like our brains, then the complexity of consciousness is equivalent to our experience. The chinese box would have its LLM-like consciousness, which we would not recognize as our own, but could still a qualitative experience born from objective information states.

Think more about your last paragraph, it undermines your argument from the previous two. If everything is the result of a physical process, then how is that an argument for consciousness being somehow fundamentally different or exceptional in our ability to recreate or simulate it?

[poikroequ]

> There is no inherent reason we couldn't just add that effect to our metal and silicon computers.

Yes, I agree with that much. Hopefully I understand you, but I do believe we could create a "consciousness chip", so to speak, that performs the proper physical process to create real conscious experience, not just simulated. But it's unlikely to happen with existing computer hardware. (by "create", I'm not saying that consciousness emerges from nothing. Rather, there's this idea of "activating" consciousness, "turning the lights on".)

> Those atoms and molecules may just be bits of information themselves in some higher order computer. But there is nothing inherently "magical" about consciousness other than its uniqueness.

I don't buy the idea that the universe is a computer nor that we're living in a simulation. I do believe there is an objective reality.

> Heck there are fairly convincing arguments for pan-consciousness where it is a fundamental part of any set of information and is simply as complex as that information system. If you have a highly complex, self referential information system like our brains, then the complexity of consciousness is equivalent to our experience. The chinese box would have its LLM-like consciousness, which we would not recognize as our own, but could still a qualitative experience born from objective information states.

It's an idea that comes out of sci-fi. It's been used as a plot device in some episodes of Star Trek. But it's just that, science fiction.

> Think more about your last paragraph, it undermines your argument from the previous two. If everything is the result of a physical process, then how is that an argument for consciousness being somehow fundamentally different or exceptional in our ability to recreate or simulate it?

That's not what I said. What I'm saying is computers are not magically conscious. Could we recreate consciousness with the right hardware? Sure, I don't see why not, like what I said with a "consciousness chip" . But is consciousness magically going to emerge purely from a simulation without any special hardware? No, of course not.

[The5thElephant]

> It's an idea that comes out of sci-fi. It's been used as a plot device in some episodes of Star Trek. But it's just that, science fiction.

I'm not talking about hand-wavy sci-fi or spiritual "the universe is a sentient being" stuff. I'm talking about one of the few solutions to what the nature of qualia is and why we aren't philosophical zombies. Why would the universe have some mechanism of consciousness available to it prior to those structures even existing? What is more convincing about a physical process being the literal mechanism for consciousness and not an informational process that has an abstracted physical basis? Could the literal mechanism not just be the information system considering you can create the same behaviors in a simulation as in reality?

Consciousness being some thing that just appears in the universe all of a sudden because evolution happened on this "neat trick" in physics seems more "magical" than it being an emergent property of increasing more complex systems, but a property that has always been there. We see the same emergent behavior appear in all sorts of systems built using different parts and/or simulated as long as they are in the same context of rules. Why wouldn't that also hold true for the emergent behavior of consciousness?

The argument for it being this unique thing that only can happen via a strict physical process strikes me as dualist. Why is it a unique thing?

[poikroequ]

As I said before, you can simulate a nuclear explosion, but that simulation will never manifest itself into a real nuclear explosion.

There's a physical basis for most things. A magnetic field forms because you have a bunch of particles with the same quantum spin. A stove burner glows red when you run electricity through it.

I'm not saying the process in the brain is unique. I'm not saying there's only one way to "activate" consciousness. Heck, for all I know, maybe a bolt of lightning experiences consciousness, even if just for a fraction of a second.

Allow me to give you a "physical" example. The brain operates near a critical threshold, that is the edge of chaos. The brain is teetering on the edge of chaos without ever going chaotic. Well, not usually, because when the brain does enter chaos, you get a seizure. But there is growing evidence that this may be a prerequisite for consciousness; when the brain enters a less chaotic state, a person may lose consciousness.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8851554/

Now let's talk about information processing. Most of what our brains do is subconscious. Only a small subset of what our brains do is actually conscious. What makes some information processing more special than others that some of it is conscious and the rest is not? Isn't it more likely that the way the information is processed is what makes the difference? I.e. different at a physical level.

[The5thElephant]

The nuclear explosion analogy is a bit off since for anything living in the simulation the nuclear explosion would be quite real. The explosion isn't real for us in the physical world because it cannot interact with us, but a simulated mind can interact with us in the real world.

> Only a small subset of what our brains do is actually conscious. What makes some information processing more special than others that some of it is conscious and the rest is not?

This is an excellent way of approaching the question, but I just as easily can say isn't it more likely that the difference is the pattern of the information and not the strict physical structure that makes it? Look at how many different physical structures and mechanisms we have for seeing, hearing, breathing, touching, etc across nature. Many of them are fundamentally different from each other, but end up in the same result of a sense.

Isn't it more likely that conscious thinking is like other senses in that it's a kind of information processing, rather than a specific mechanism of processing?

This also make it more likely to answer your question of why are some mental processes conscious and the majority are not, it would seem far more likely that the brain's neuronal structures (most of which are the same basic cell throughout the brain, just in different types of structures) discover different patterns rather than fundamentally different physical processes.