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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I invite you to demonstrate any other model for what human consciousness could possible be.

I mean there have literally been hundreds if not thousands of models of consciousness proposed over the last few thousand years, so take your pick? The burden of proof is on you to show why your mechanical view of consciousness is superior to all of the others.

I think there's been a lot of foolishness in history but conflating consciousness and intelligence/formidability at solving consequentialist tasks is just too indefensible to bring up.

I will point to the obvious trend line where ever greater fractions of human neurobiology and cognition have received mechanistic interpretations and a firm conceptual underpinning. Are we 100% done with it? No. But we can see temporal lobe epilepsy causing visions of supernatural entities, the precise firing and wiring of our visual neurons, and plenty more.

All a mechanistic theory of consciousness truly requires is that it obeys the laws of physics, and having peered into a few brains myself, I didn't spot anything contradicting the Standard Model of Physics.

This kind of rebuttal is about as valid as claiming that modern empirical/Western medicine is unfounded because there have been plenty of models before that proved flawed, and even its adherents admit it's not 100% perfect at explaining or treating illness. That's leaving aside that a mechanistic model that doesn't rely on supernatural/preternatural influences doesn't happen to be simply better/more parsimonious by Occam's Razor. I fail to see what additional empirical evidence the alternatives provide, so it remains the default assumption even if it's incomplete.

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