[082349872349872]

> This would probably be the heart of the disagreement

OK, sounds like we're agreed there.

If souls are required for consciousness, then I guess we could try to decide which creatures are conscious by first deciding which have souls? Would that question be any easier to answer that way around?

[smokedetector1]

I thought we were talking about "what is consciousness" rather than "which creatures are conscious." The conversation started with "consciousness is just [a series of material processes resulting in an illusion of interiority, rather than a genuine phenomenon of -- for lack of a better word -- personhood]"

I would probably say "consciousness is the soul" rather than "souls are required for consciousness," but either way I don't see how that helps the fundamental issue that it's impossible to physically prove another creature's interiority, including humans.

[visarga]

What I said was that it's all search. We search and learn, search and learn. This feels like consciousness because it is a recurrent process that feeds on itself. We create relational representations from data, and these representations encode the structure of our experiences. In other words embeddings explain away the qualitative aspects of qualia.

[smokedetector1]

Just declaring that they explain it away doesn't make it so. You've come up with a theory that, from 10,000 feet up, could correspond with certain observations of consciousness. Why should it be true?

[082349872349872]

We were talking about "what is consciousness" but rapidly hit an end.

Sorry for the lack of clarity: "which creatures are conscious" was my attempt to switch topics to a line which I had hoped might be mutually interesting.

Cheers!

[smokedetector1]

Before we stop, if you don't mind, could you answer why you are dissatisfied with the idea that there's a soul, and why we need to do away with it 100%?

To be clear, I really do take issue with the 100% aspect. There are many psychological functions that are clearly at least mediated if not outright caused by the brain and body.

But I think some people say "there's so many functions that are physical, that probably 100% are and we just don't know it yet." But that doesn't seem logically any more forced than "there's a soul that's mediated by the brain," so I don't know why people are so willing to give up the soul.