[thepasch]

That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."

And this bit:

> I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.

right after

> Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.

So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"

Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.

[selcuka]

> So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"

Those are not conflicting arguments.

The former means that we understand all the processeses, but they are complex, therefore we don't have enough brain/compute power to properly model it.

The latter means that we don't understand some of those processes, so we need additional theories that explain them.

One can dismiss the first while finding the second plausible.

[thepasch]

I suppose complexity defines to me as something that's inherently hard to understand. The definition of "complex" is "difficult to understand." The move I don't agree with is proceeding to posit "because we don't understand them yet, there must be something special about them."

[hn_throwaway_99]

OK, I'll try another attempt. I thought this other comment explained it better than I could have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 .

The reason TFA (and, frankly, your comment as well) pissed me off is that they drip with condescension to the core while completely sidestepping the problem in the first place. We have plenty of other examples of places where complexity can give rise to emergent behavior, but those behaviors are still easy to understand in the problem space of the domain - e.g. I may be amazed that I can converse with an LLM and it feels like it completely "understands" the conversation, but I don't have any conceptual problems with the fact that it's still just next token prediction under the covers.

But as hackinthebochs put it very well, in my opinion: "The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function."

So my negative reaction is based in the belief that what the TFA is doing is saying "there is no hard problem", and the response is "but why, because 'phenomenal consciousness' can't be described in terms of structure and function like every other instance that we understand that arises from complexity", and then TFA just gives a host of complexity examples that are completely unconvincing (and, again, feel like they completely miss the problem is the first place) and just basically ends with a dangling, unwarranted "q.e.d."

[namero999]

The "complexity -> magic" argument is just religious belief. Something one accepts without proof or a shed of coherent reasoning around it.