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Re:What the brain's wiring looks like by tux1968 on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:46PM (#14719846)
Ah, then we're much closer together than I thought.

However, there is no reason future computers will be limited to current (Turing) technology instead of being a collection of many co-processors with differing capabilities.

The main point though, is that since consciousness is housed in the physical brain, we can dissect, understand, and recreate fully-functional synthetic versions. While each person is in their own subjective world, the brain which is responsible for it is an objective object that is open to study.

Re:What the brain's wiring looks like by wildmusings on Saturday July 08, 2017 @05:49AM (#14724804)
>However, there is no reason future computers will be limited to current (Turing) technology instead of being a collection of many co-processors with differing capabilities.

That would violate the Church-Turing thesis, which is pretty widely accepted, unless the universe itself is a hypercomputer that we can leverage to perform computation.

Re:What the brain's wiring looks like by tux1968 on Saturday July 08, 2017 @08:14AM (#14725143)
You're essentially saying that our brains can't exist.

But they do, and we can copy them, what is the problem with making a synthetic brain? Why is the natural brain an allowed exception, but the one we make is not allowed?

Edit:

On the one hand you want to use Church-Turing to invalidate the possibility of us creating non-Turing based technology, and yet in a previous post you claimed the human brain likely violates Church-Turing. So which is it? Is reality allowed to violate Church-Turing or is it not?

If you honestly believe that the human brain violates Church-Turing, then you have to explain why you also believe that we can not copy the brain and achieve the same result ourselves.

Re:What the brain's wiring looks like by wildmusings on Saturday July 08, 2017 @04:31PM (#14727061)
If the universe is not computable, and if the non-computable aspects are relevant to the functioning of the human brain, then our ability to build a brain simulation is strongly limited. A functioning synthetic brain would have to leverage the same relevant natural phenomenon as a real brain; a mathematical simulation running on a standard computer would not suffice.

I do think that I actually agree with your earlier point that once we have a functioning synthetic brain, we can ignore subjective experience itself and just focus on its functional implications for the entire system.