Its not a petri dish he is referring to. He is talking about a brain implemented in silicon or graphene, i.e, a brain simulated on electronic hardware.
It doesn't matter what the brain is made of. Or would you say that if there are alien lifeforms, with their brains certainly made out of another matter than our brains, have no conscience?
I didn't mean that brain made up of silicon cannot be conscious. We are trying to simulate whatever we have learned about the brain. And that understanding is not complete. So implementing that in silicon (circuit) will not be conscious until we figure how to implement it.
Lots of what we know about the brain is implementation detail. For example brain architecture. Which part processes what. It's insignificant because when brain is young enough you can cut out whole hemisphere and end up with completely functioning individual.
When babys brain grows up it reassimilates most of the neurons that it grew. Architecture of the brain is shaped by funcion during development. The brain begins as generic structure that undegoes optimisations for the sole purpose of probably energy efficiency.
I'm not assuming. I just don't know any viable theories of how it isn't a brain process, and how one determines that not-a-brain process is or isn't present in all the variations in humans, brain injury cases, birth defects, etc.
> Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.
That's one of those things that sounds potentially profound but if you consider the strange consequences of physics on the very nature of reality, the ability to ponder the big or the small or the strange doesn't seem to present a lot of barriers to scientific thought.
I am a physicist by training and I was a hard core reductionist. But then, reduction to physics is just another philosophical stance and not an inductively generated statement like the laws of physics. Also, induction (empirical not mathematical) is not fool proof like deduction.
Even if we arrive at a TOE, how do we justify that the universe will always obey those laws in the future? Physical reductionism is easy to understand but upon closer inspection seems to lack a strong foundation.
Also, the laws of physics have zero consequence on logic and mathematics upon which the enterprise of physics rests on along with empirical data.