[Eisenstein]

> you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his perspective, which I think is more in line with his real perspective, as implyimg that replicating the human mind machine requires truly replicating it physically

I'm not sure I understand. If we must replicate a human brain physically in order to create something that has consciousness, then how is that not something 'special that cannot be reproduced by a machine'?

[redwood]

Your comment does serve the point I was making. Still there is a perspective that if you could artificially reproduce the human mind top to bottom, a truly perfect reproduction in other words, then you ought to be able to trigger an identical consciousness. In other words yes special type of machine is needed for the machine nevertheless not some special soul.

Of course the counterpoint and maybe the one you're making is that special machine ought to be simply called a soul machine and we could all agree it would be very difficult to reproduce it and it is intrinsically special... but maybe that's for the very specific form of Consciousness we have... but maybe there are other forms

[Eisenstein]

That perspective is 'biological exceptionalism' and requires that there is something specific to biology that allows consciousness while precluding anything not biological. For that to be convincing there must be a mechanism and no one has proposed anything other than a soul for that.

[redwood]

This is where I would say that to defining that mechanism is the hard problem... it's a mischaracterization to call it the easy problem. But it doesn't require a soul