Computers are not conscious simply because they are programmed to make decisions; plants are likely in the same position.
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Koch might wish to consider William James’s neglected theory of consciousness: the brain does not create the mind; it focuses it.
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Materialism in neuroscience is not a finding, it is a tenet. It does not need to be true. It simply needs to be enforced.
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Without a subhuman, the human mind has no history. That is a serious blow to any Darwinian materialist project.
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Art cannot have helped make us more human if we did not start out that way. And that in turn could not have happened without some impetus that was simply not granted to any other life form.
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The debate in Krakow, Poland, sponsored by education foundation Fundacja En Arche is now available, with translation, at YouTube.
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The messy processes of the brain that enable the various layers of consciousness bear no relationship to what happens in computers.
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We can’t do more than wonder but the main thing to see here is that the special position of humans might enable it.
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Consciousness is an immaterial creation given only to human beings to enable us to have a relationship with a higher power and to understand our universe better.
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It’s supposed to be a given that machines or brain organoids might be conscious despite not knowing what that is or how it works — but preborn children can’t be…
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Everyone believes in free will, including Coyne. He writes sophistry denying free will but he rails at the moral reprobate who dented his fender.
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Part of the reason we don’t know exactly how anesthesia works is surely that we do not know what consciousness is (there are at least 325 theories out there).
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Good dialogue is like great poetry where the real meaning can sometimes be hidden or disguised beneath the words.
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Lê’s essay offers a much more sober assessment of transhumanism, the war on human exceptionalism, and the idea that machines think like people.
Read More ›Michael Egnor comments that academics often hold such beliefs because they make them sound clever, not because they make sense.
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We don’t have a reason to expect the eliminative materialism Carlo Rovelli recommends, which has not helped in the past, to be more help in the future.
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Where exactly is a popular song located? It lives in memory, human and recorded, in many forms. But it occupies no spatial location.
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Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agrees; the image of storing and erasing memories is popular due to computer technology but not relevant to memory.
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Neuroplasticity is a very interesting and important area of research. But the careless and casual attribution of unexpected mental states to it is junk science.
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The question isn’t whether AI will harm us. The question is actually whether we will remain human.
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