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Ah, but something acting self-aware and something being conscious are not necessarily the same thing. I can imagine a p-zombie that acts just as self-aware as any human, but has no subjective experience.
Even if we create AI that is indistinguishable from a human in terms of how self-aware it acts and how intelligent it is, that does not necessarily mean that we will understand whether it is conscious or not, even though we have access to all of its inner workings. I think the same is true of humans. Even if we manage to completely map a brain and learn to understand every minute detail of how that brain thinks, how it deduces new insights and so on, I do not necessarily think that that would bring us any closer to understanding why that human being is conscious.
To me, assuming that eventually, mapping the brain or creating human-level artificial intelligence will explain to us how consciousness works is just as unsupported an argument as any pro-Christian argument. Intelligence and consciousness might well be orthogonal, in which case no level of understanding how intelligence works will bring us any closer to understanding consciousness.
Speaking as someone who believes in the existence of a soul--if we fully mapped out a brain, then I think consciousness would by necessity have to be an emergent property of normal neuron behavior. That's not to say we'd necessarily understand consciousness, but we'd at least know that it somehow stems from neurons and physical matter.
The alternative is that consciousness has no causal effect on matter, in which case, how do you know that you're conscious? How does your brain receive the signal telling it about consciousness and the qualia of self-awareness?
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I find that to be a distinction without a difference. It could be that we aren't self aware and are just next token predictors with a large context window. If it is indistinguishable then that is the same as being as self aware as we can prove we are.
It is a distinction with a huge difference. I don't need to prove that I am conscious. It is self-evident to me. I am, currently, having subjective experience. The mystery is, why? Why is this subjective experience correlated with this physical body? Does the physical body give rise to the consciousness somehow? Many people assume that it does. After all, if the physical body is given certain drugs the self-reported consciousness will go away (deep sleep). So it seems as if there is some connection. Yet all the efforts of philosophers and scientists have brought us not even one millimeter closer to understanding why the consciousness exists. I think it is possible that in principle, the hard problem of consciousness is and always will be beyond the reach of science.
Yes they have, basically if you stuff enough compute into the prefrontal cortex you get consciousness, you damage or remove it and you lose it. It is all physical stuff we can understand.
There is not one shred of evidence for this.
Nope, philosophy and science do not understand why consciousness exists in the least bit. There has been literally zero progress on this front despite enormous efforts.
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/147/3/794/7424860
The prefrontal cortex is so important to human beings that, if deprived of it, our behaviour is reduced to action-reactions and automatisms, with no ability to make deliberate decisions. Why does the prefrontal cortex hold such importance in humans? In answer, this review draws on the proximity between humans and other primates, which enables us, through comparative anatomical-functional analysis, to understand the cognitive functions we have in common and specify those that distinguish humans from their closest cousins.
None of that has anything to do with consciousness, subjective experience. Decision-making ability and consciousness are two different things.
If you haven't already, I suggest that you read about the hard problem of consciousness.
You didn't read the article. Yes it has everything to do with consciousness.
Like what? I see several mentions of consciousness in it but nothing that would even come close to providing information about how the brain gives rise to consciousness (if it even does at all).
I think that your belief that science has made inroads into explaining consciousness is just as unsupported as any Christian's faith.
I am not even sure that you mean the same thing by "consciousness" as I do. I mean subjective experience, qualia. You talk about "self-awareness", which can mean two different things: either an intelligence having a model of itself, or being subjectively aware of oneself. The former has nothing necessarily to do with consciousness, you could theoretically have an intelligence that has a model of itself but has no subjective experience. The latter does.
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