Not without input data, they couldn't. You can produce a model, but unless you collect data to validate your model against, you're just speculating in a void.
> There's something fundamental that we don't understand and the scientific community is very opposed to talking about it, dismissing any and all speculation as quackery.
We're talking about it right now, and I haven't heard anyone opposed to talking about it.
However, I'll fully dismiss opinions as quackery if they clearly misrepresent the facts, i.e. claims that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or Bell's Inequalities prove free will are quackery. This isn't because the ideas are taboo or because I'm opposed to talking about them, it's because they're misrepresentations or misunderstandings of facts which are clearly established.
In my experience, when people claim that scientists are opposed to talking about their hypothesis, it's because their hypothesis has been thoroughly and concretely disproven.
Yes. What's not to see? I think appealing to something other than Turing machines shows a lack of imagination; it takes a lot of thought to even scratch the surface of how profound Turing machines are.
> I'm not suggesting anything supernatural. I'm suggesting that there's possibly physical phenomenon that do not fit our current materialist model.
Absolutely. Sure, there are of course physical phenomenon that do not fit our current materialist model.
Let's say we discover those additional phenomenon. Ultimately, we'd want to build a machine to model that phenomenon. Perhaps encode a model of that phenomenon in software. Once that happens, scribbling numbers on a piece of paper indeed could give rise to a conscious being.
If it's some system that can't be covered by scientific understanding, isn't that what supernatural means? It's either some internally consistent (but possibly very complicated) set of rules, or it's supernatural.
Rather than 'possessing' an infinite tape and infinite time, I prefer to think of turing machines as always being allowed to perform one more step, and always being allowed to use one more tape cell. I find this characterisation of time quite intuitive as-is, whilst the tape can be made intuitive by imagining tape factories on each end, which produce more cells whenever the read/write head gets close.
In fact, such "tape factories" have been used to build universal turing machines in the game of life http://rendell-attic.org/gol/fullutm/index.htm
Yes. I find that no less plausible than a warm sack of meat giving rise to a conscious being.
> I don't see how
> That means that a Turing Machine would be able to
> produce them
> the scientific community is very opposed to talking
> about it
Further, my big problem is with people trying to ignore the problem completely by claiming that there is no Hard Problem or even suggesting that consciousness is not real. It's a total head-in-the-sand position to take but it's the dominant stance.