Sentience is unresolved, but it’s explorable by science and it should be possible to trace back the process by which the data is generated to see what its claims about sentience are based on, so we will get answers on it some day. For everything other than sentience/consciousness though, we see no examples of reductionism failing.
We have tried tracing back reports of qualia, and what you get is a causal story in which qualia as such , feelings rather than neural firings, don’t feature.
Doing more of the same will probably result in the same. So there is no great likelihood that the problem of sentience will succumb to a conventional approach.
The data making claims about feelings must be generated somewhere by a mechanism which will either reveal that it is merely generating baseless assertions or reveal a trail on from there to a place where actual feelings guide the generation of that data in such a way that the data is true. Science has clearly not traced this back far enough to get answers yet because we don’t have evidence of either of the possible origins of this data, but in principle we should be able to reach the origin unless the mechanism passes on through into some inaccessible quantum realm. If you’re confident that it won’t go that far, then the origin of that data should show up in the neural nets, although it’ll take a devil of a long time to untangle them all and to pin down their exact functionality.
It shows that being a spreadsheet is unproblematically reductive. It doesn’t show that sentience is.
The insistence that something is true when there is no evidence is the abandandonment of science.
Sentience is unresolved, but it’s explorable by science and it should be possible to trace back the process by which the data is generated to see what its claims about sentience are based on, so we will get answers on it some day. For everything other than sentience/consciousness though, we see no examples of reductionism failing.
We have tried tracing back reports of qualia, and what you get is a causal story in which qualia as such , feelings rather than neural firings, don’t feature.
Doing more of the same will probably result in the same. So there is no great likelihood that the problem of sentience will succumb to a conventional approach.
The data making claims about feelings must be generated somewhere by a mechanism which will either reveal that it is merely generating baseless assertions or reveal a trail on from there to a place where actual feelings guide the generation of that data in such a way that the data is true. Science has clearly not traced this back far enough to get answers yet because we don’t have evidence of either of the possible origins of this data, but in principle we should be able to reach the origin unless the mechanism passes on through into some inaccessible quantum realm. If you’re confident that it won’t go that far, then the origin of that data should show up in the neural nets, although it’ll take a devil of a long time to untangle them all and to pin down their exact functionality.