I agree with almost all of what you wrote. Here’s the only line I disagree with.
If your theory of such things, is that they are nothing more than labels applied by a neural net to certain inputs, inputs that are not actually changing or colorful or meaningful—then you are in denial about your own experience.
I affirm that my own subjective experience is as you describe; I deny that I am in denial about its import.
I want to be clear that I’m discussing the topic of what makes sense to affirm as most plausible given what we know. In particular, I’m not calling your conjecture impossible.
Human brains don’t look different in lower-level organization than those of, say, cats, and there’s no higher level structure in the brain that obviously corresponds to whatever special sauce it is that makes humans conscious. On the other hand, there are specific brain regions which are known to carry out specific functional tasks. My understanding is that human subjective experience, when picked apart by reductive cognitive neuroscience, appears to be an ex post facto narrative constructed/integrated out of events whose causes can be more-or-less assigned to particular functional sub-components of the brain. Positing that there’s a special sauce—especially a non-classical one—just because my brain’s capacity for self-reflection includes an impression of “unity of consciousness”—well, to me, it’s not the simplest conceivable explanation.
Maybe the universe really does admit the possibility of an agent which approximates my internal structure to arbitrary (or at least sufficient) accuracy and claims to have conscious experiences for reasons which are isomorphic to my own, yet actually has none because it’s implemented on an inadequate physical substrate. But I doubt it.
I agree with almost all of what you wrote. Here’s the only line I disagree with.
I affirm that my own subjective experience is as you describe; I deny that I am in denial about its import.
I want to be clear that I’m discussing the topic of what makes sense to affirm as most plausible given what we know. In particular, I’m not calling your conjecture impossible.
Human brains don’t look different in lower-level organization than those of, say, cats, and there’s no higher level structure in the brain that obviously corresponds to whatever special sauce it is that makes humans conscious. On the other hand, there are specific brain regions which are known to carry out specific functional tasks. My understanding is that human subjective experience, when picked apart by reductive cognitive neuroscience, appears to be an ex post facto narrative constructed/integrated out of events whose causes can be more-or-less assigned to particular functional sub-components of the brain. Positing that there’s a special sauce—especially a non-classical one—just because my brain’s capacity for self-reflection includes an impression of “unity of consciousness”—well, to me, it’s not the simplest conceivable explanation.
Maybe the universe really does admit the possibility of an agent which approximates my internal structure to arbitrary (or at least sufficient) accuracy and claims to have conscious experiences for reasons which are isomorphic to my own, yet actually has none because it’s implemented on an inadequate physical substrate. But I doubt it.