Re:Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
by hackinthebochs on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @12:19PM
(#22046908)
>In that theory, the causality works the other way, and digital replicas will not have consciousness
Why not? Digital stuff is made up of matter as well. Unless there's something special about neurons when it comes to consciousness, i.e. the conscious bits reside in neurons and nowhere else for some reason, there's reason to think non-biological structures that produce the same output would also be conscious. Any substantive theory of consciousness, materialist or not, will need to include a place for structure and dynamics, i.e. information cascades, within their theory to account for the correlations we observe between conscious states and brain structure and dynamics. But these qualities are present in a digital implementation as well.
Why not? Digital stuff is made up of matter as well. Unless there's something special about neurons when it comes to consciousness, i.e. the conscious bits reside in neurons and nowhere else for some reason, there's reason to think non-biological structures that produce the same output would also be conscious. Any substantive theory of consciousness, materialist or not, will need to include a place for structure and dynamics, i.e. information cascades, within their theory to account for the correlations we observe between conscious states and brain structure and dynamics. But these qualities are present in a digital implementation as well.