3 ms·

Isn't that a category mistake? one's subjective experience ~is~ the action of one's neurons. The alternative is, with sam, to grant the existence of an immateri

• JonnieCache 10y ago
  That isn't really explanatory to me though. It's like identifying your running operating system with the patterns of electron spins in your hard disk/RAM: while they may be identifiable with each other, that doesn't mean you can derive useful knowledge about one from the other without a huge amount of other information which has little to do with the hard disk itself, and isn't really encoded in it. The amount of information we need to derive consciousness from neurons could be enormous. My (utterly uninformed) guess is that there are huge frontiers of information theory which need to be crossed first. Similarly to how the discovery of entropy revealed new kinds of knowledge about physical systems, and new ways of obtaining it. While physics definitely does not have any hiding place for the soul (the relevant energy scales have all been explored,) the interface between biology and information theory is largely unknown, and potentially limitless. There is something called Integrated-Information Theory which attempts to do that kind of thing, but it doesn't seem to be thought very credible by the experts.