[lobofta]

Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.

[foobarian]

It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking.

My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What if there is some quantum field effect powering everything?

[jcynix]

Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains.

Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention.

Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.

[foobarian]

Mostly I have a hard time accepting that a Turing machine can experience "consciousness"/awareness. Therefore I also have a hard time with simulatable chemical processes; it feels like there is some missing link there.

All just feelings/vibes unfortunately.

[jcynix]

I can sympathise with you, but how could a "quantum" effect" doesn't make this easier?

Maybe "Turing machine" is too abstract or simplistic as a concept? Both for real computers and brains?

I can see that a computer is on some level just a lot of sand (silica and metal) but put together in a really complex way, it "suddenly" can add and compare numbers … if we observe the complexity levels from sand to computer and try to see the analogy when comparing cells / neurons to a structure of billions of them somehow interconnected on both a physical and chemical level, evolved during millions of years, I have no problem to accept that brains are still too complex to explain for us.

[tim333]

They know quite a lot about how neurons work to the extent they can replace bits of brains with artificial retinas or cochleas and interface with devices like neuralink. It's unlikely there is a quantum field effect of the type you mention powering things, although of course atoms and the like obey quantum mechanics in the normal way.