[wisty]

AFAIK every argument against conciousness being emergent is just a weak "God of the gaps" argument (since we don't fully understand it all) or a nonsense analogy like the Chinsese room where if you seperate the hardware and software it's not concious anymore (like, duh, remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either).

Yeah, the weights not updating online makes them less like a living organism that can update and learn and evolve ... ok ....

[ViscountPenguin]

I find that a lot of arguments against emergent consciousness seem to just come out of an atheist rephrasing of abrhamic priors about the existence of a "soul". In personal chats, I've found people from East Asian countries (minus Korea, which makes sense) to be much more open to the idea of machine consciousness.

[InsideOutSanta]

I don't find the Chinese room compelling, since it appeals to intuition where our intuition is already not trustworthy. It's like trying to use intuition to understand quantum mechanics; you can't.

How do you actually know the Chinese room isn't conscious? It's merely obvious that it isn't, but that's not evidence.

[aleksiy123]

It’s not even obvious that it isn’t conscious imho.

[slopinthebag]

> remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either

What is no longer conscious, the brain? Or the body? Or some other entity?

If consciousness is weakly emergent, how do we know it emerges from the solely from the brain and not, say, brain + body? Or brain + body + or environment. Or from the universe itself?

[wisty]

You can draw a line somewhere. Peole argue against conciousness by constructing (deliberately or not) an example where the line is drawn in a silly place.

[plastic-enjoyer]

I don't know if I can trust someone's understanding of arguments against consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, when he didn't even understand what the Chinese room was all about in the first place.

(Spoiler, it was not about consciousness)

[overgard]

People shouldn't need to make an argument against consciousness. The responsibility is on the people claiming there is consciousness. Nobody can actually give a decent "why" for why it should be conscious, it's just pseudoscience and wishful thinking. It's not up to everyone else to try to prove a negative just because people have gotten a little too attached to ChatGPT

I could say something like "the reason why people and animals are conscious is quantum mechanical effects". Ok, maybe, it would be hard to prove me wrong because nobody knows, but it's not a very useful statement by me if I can't tell you why you should believe me on that.

[DangitBobby]

Check out Panpsychism and its close cousin Idealism.