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You missed the entire point. Physics and biology exist to help humans understand the material universe. Anything supposing that humans aren’t actually intelli

• ben_w 3y ago
  I'm not missing the point, I'm saying you're wrong. There's a difference. Also: > Anything supposing that humans aren’t actually intelligent or conscious or whatever Doesn't really match what I was writing about: if it turns out that a thing which is "just a pattern recognizer" can in fact be "intelligent or conscious or whatever", it's up to us if we see intelligence or consciousness or whatever in the pattern recognisers that we build, or if we ourselves descend into solipsism and/or nihilism. Or if we take the traditional path of sticking our fingers in our ears and go "la la la I'm not listening" by way of managing cognitive dissonance. This is a very popular response which should not be underestimated. But the laws of physics are quite clear, that a whole bunch of linear equations (quantum field theory) gets us chemistry, which gets us biology, etc., and the only place in all this for the feeling of existence that we have is emergent properties. Those emergent properties may, or may not, be present in other systems, but we don't know because we're really bad at characterising how emergent properties… emerge.