| Consciousness is a topic I’m endlessly curious and fascinated about. This article seems like a good deep dive, I admit I only had the patience to skim it right now, it’s a lot of technical terms I’m unfamiliar with I’ll have to look more into later. The problem is as humans we don’t even understand our agree on what consciousness is in the first place. So it seems silly to even begin to assert one way or the other when it comes to computers (I’m not saying the author is doing that here, they title says “If”). I do think deeply exploring the idea could possibly help bring us closer to understanding consciousness when it comes to ourselves & other living creatures. The author mentions they accept “panpsychism” so I take it they accept “The hard problem of consciousness”. If I understand it correctly, in a nutshell, if you accept the hard problem, you don’t believe that brain alone can “produce” consciousness. If you reject the hard problem, consciousness and mind can be fully explained by the mechanisms of the brain and science will eventually be able to prove it. I definitely accept the hard problem, but I find myself more in the one of the “idealism” or “neutral monism” buckets. I don’t believe the field of neuroscience is ever going to scientifically explain consciousness. The same way neuroscience was an emergent field that combined ideas from different disciplines, I think we don’t yet have a field of study that’s looking at consciousness in the right way. Especially as programmers, it’s easy to model the brain like it’s a computer, with CPU/ RAM/ hard drive. But science doesn’t back any of that up. Take memories for example, nobody knows where they go. The brain as far as we can tell doesn’t act like a hard drive. I think it’s much more likely there is another “layer” of reality that Consciousness & Mind lives in that our current physics doesn’t & probably can’t explain. I think it’s likely our brains act more like an antenna that receive consciousness, rather than they are “computing” it in isolation. |