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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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For all intents and purposes if we could simulate a human brain down to the chemical reactions and electrons and voltage potentials doing their thing it would be a human WITH qualia.

How do you know this? I don't think we can conclude this without actually doing it and checking. And I don't think we have the technology to do this yet or even to check it.

How do you know this? I don't think we can conclude this without actually doing it and checking. And I don't think we have the technology to do this yet or even to check it.

The physiological analogy between you and me is my reason for thinking that you are conscious. Why would I not make the same inference for a sufficiently analogous artificial simulation of your brain?

That is quite reasonable and basically matches my own beliefs on the matter, but what if you are mistaken in your belief that my being conscious has that much to do with the physiological analogy between yourself and myself? I don't think we know if you're mistaken on that, and I'm not sure it's even possible to find out right now.

There are lots of things that I might be mistaken about. I might be mistaken in my belief that my laptop is not suddenly going to transform into a dragon and eat me. Both of these are ultimately derived from inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning is rational but not infallible.

Infallibility is an excessive standard for knowledge.

It seems to me that there's more reason to be confident that one is not mistaken about the belief that one's laptop won't transform into a dragon than to be confident that one is not mistaken about the belief that someone else's consciousness is contingent on the physical analogy between one's own brain and their brain, though. We have some pretty deep level of understanding of the physics of a laptop and creatures like dragons and how they relate to each other based on our studies of things like plastic and metal and reptiles. We might be mistaken, but I think we've reduced the error bars quite a bit. I don't know that we can say the same for our study of how consciousness arises.

Yes, I have more evidence in the laptop/dragon case than in the my mind/your mind case, and more evidence in either case than that an artificial mind would be conscious. However, all of them are knowable.

And I don't think we have the technology to do this yet or even to check it.

We never will. This is in the realm of metaphysics. No matter how much technological progress we make, I don't think it's even conceivable that we could invent a machine that tells you whether or not I'm a philosophical zombie.

No matter how much technological progress we make, I don't think it's even conceivable that we could invent a machine that tells you whether or not I'm a philosophical zombie.

Not with our current level of understanding of consciousness and qualia, at least. I'm not ready to discount the possibility of some future developments in physics discovering some sort of physical, material instantiation of "having an experience" that can be measured or at least detected, though. I've no idea what that would look like, or even what some fictional scifi/fantasy versions of such concepts look like, though. As you said, it's inconceivable.

How do you know this?

Lets call it a strong conviction in materialism.

I don't think we can conclude this without actually doing it and checking. And I don't think we have the technology to do this yet or even to check it.

I don't think we do yet either.