This is not correct. Science is not making any claims about subjective consciousness. It makes claims about other meanings of the term “consciousness”, but about subjective phenomenology it is silent or incoherent. For example, the claim “Consciousness is made of atoms” is just silliness. What type of atoms? Boron? Carbon? Hydrogen? And in virtue of what feature of atoms, is red the way it is?
If you read this mini-sequence and say you can imagine a Zombie Mary in this kind of detail, then I declare your intuition broken. By which I mean, we’d have to drop the topic or ask if one type of intuition has more reason to work (given what science tells us).
Your consciousness is made of atoms. Not a single kind of atom, but many different kinds. I cannot recite the entirety of the human biochemistry from heart, but I am sure it is readily available somewhere in peer reviewed publications. The fact of the matter is that your consciousness is a program running on the specialized wetware that is your brain. It might be possible to run your consciousness in a microanatomical computersimulation, but a microana sim is still run on a computer made of atoms.
Now iformation theoretically it must be possible to say something about this consciousness property that some progams exhibit and others don’t, or maybe there isn’t a hard and fast point where consciousness is defined and it is in fact a continuous spectrum. I don’t know, but if I am to bet I say the latter.
There must also then be some way of making definite statements about how that conscious program will act if it is copied from one medium (human) to another (microanatomical sim).
The information theoretical facts does not change that the computer or the brain that runs the conscious program is still a real physical thing. So we can with science say something about the computation substrate which is made of atoms, about the consciousness property which is information theory, and about the nature of copying a mind which is also information theory.
Now, are you telling me that information theory, chemsitry and electrical engineering are not sciences?
This is not correct. Science is not making any claims about subjective consciousness. It makes claims about other meanings of the term “consciousness”, but about subjective phenomenology it is silent or incoherent. For example, the claim “Consciousness is made of atoms” is just silliness. What type of atoms? Boron? Carbon? Hydrogen? And in virtue of what feature of atoms, is red the way it is?
If you read this mini-sequence and say you can imagine a Zombie Mary in this kind of detail, then I declare your intuition broken. By which I mean, we’d have to drop the topic or ask if one type of intuition has more reason to work (given what science tells us).
Your consciousness is made of atoms. Not a single kind of atom, but many different kinds. I cannot recite the entirety of the human biochemistry from heart, but I am sure it is readily available somewhere in peer reviewed publications. The fact of the matter is that your consciousness is a program running on the specialized wetware that is your brain. It might be possible to run your consciousness in a microanatomical computersimulation, but a microana sim is still run on a computer made of atoms.
Now iformation theoretically it must be possible to say something about this consciousness property that some progams exhibit and others don’t, or maybe there isn’t a hard and fast point where consciousness is defined and it is in fact a continuous spectrum. I don’t know, but if I am to bet I say the latter.
There must also then be some way of making definite statements about how that conscious program will act if it is copied from one medium (human) to another (microanatomical sim).
The information theoretical facts does not change that the computer or the brain that runs the conscious program is still a real physical thing. So we can with science say something about the computation substrate which is made of atoms, about the consciousness property which is information theory, and about the nature of copying a mind which is also information theory.
Now, are you telling me that information theory, chemsitry and electrical engineering are not sciences?