I have no idea what you are trying to say. I think you agree consciousness must have a mechanistic/material base, and is some kind of emergent phenomenon, so we probably agree on whatever point you’re trying to make. Except I guess you think that even though it’s an emergent phenomenon of some mechanistic base, that mechanistic base can’t be non-biological. Which is weird.
My argument has nothing to do with the fact that computers aren’t biological. I’m saying that the only blueprints for consciousness we have right now are brains. And decidedly not computers, which I have no reason to believe will become sentient if you extrapolate it for some reason. I don’t think the difference between computers and brains is biological, it’s just a difference. If you replicated an entire brain I think it would be sentient even though it wouldn’t be strictly “biological”. I guess you could call that a computer, but then you’re veering into semantics. I’m referring to computers strictly in the way that they are currently built.
I think there’s a mechanistic road to sentience, but we know vanishingly little about it. But I think we know more than enough to conclude that computers, as they operate today, will struggle to be anything more than a crude analogy. My point is that artificial sentience needs to be more than just “a mechanism”, because literally everything in the universe is a mechanism. It needs to be a certain kind of mechanism that we don’t understand yet.
I have no idea what you are trying to say. I think you agree consciousness must have a mechanistic/material base, and is some kind of emergent phenomenon, so we probably agree on whatever point you’re trying to make. Except I guess you think that even though it’s an emergent phenomenon of some mechanistic base, that mechanistic base can’t be non-biological. Which is weird.
My argument has nothing to do with the fact that computers aren’t biological. I’m saying that the only blueprints for consciousness we have right now are brains. And decidedly not computers, which I have no reason to believe will become sentient if you extrapolate it for some reason. I don’t think the difference between computers and brains is biological, it’s just a difference. If you replicated an entire brain I think it would be sentient even though it wouldn’t be strictly “biological”. I guess you could call that a computer, but then you’re veering into semantics. I’m referring to computers strictly in the way that they are currently built.
I think there’s a mechanistic road to sentience, but we know vanishingly little about it. But I think we know more than enough to conclude that computers, as they operate today, will struggle to be anything more than a crude analogy. My point is that artificial sentience needs to be more than just “a mechanism”, because literally everything in the universe is a mechanism. It needs to be a certain kind of mechanism that we don’t understand yet.