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Koch believes “that consciousness is a fundamental, elementary property of living matter.” Consciousness is “magic” then. Even if we build machines to mimic a
by htk 7y ago
Koch believes “that consciousness is a fundamental, elementary property of living matter.”
Consciousness is “magic” then.
Even if we build machines to mimic a real brain, “it’ll be like a golem stumbling about,” he writes: adept at the Turing Test perhaps, but a zombie.
This guy created a whole moat of unfalsifiability around his views.
- vanusa 7y agoConsciousness is “magic” then. That doesn't follow at all.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoThey're in the camp that since you can't measure subjective experience its magic. Well, they're here reading this, since they cant measure their experience they must not exist. /s
- ben_w 7y agoYour second quote sounds like a fairly straightforward description of P-zombies to me: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie However, to add to the criticism you have of this article about this book, your two quotes taken together appear to be contradictory: if consciousness is a fundamental element of living matter, then given that we can make new living matter, why should there be any reason we can’t make a conscious artificial machine?
- edflsafoiewq 7y agoP-zombies are magical nonsense.
- goatlover 7y agoMagic has nothing to do with it. P-zombies are a philosophical thought experiment against physicalism. The point of the argument is to demonstrate that a purely physical description leaves out conscious experience. Nagel made the same point regarding bat sonar consciousness and science’s view from nowhere.
- goatlover 7y agoNo more magic than anything else fundamental. I don’t know whether consciousness is fundamental, but magical has nothing to do with being fundamental, unless existence itself is magical.