Can you give me an example of how, even in principle, this would work? Construct a toy universe in which there are living things causally determined by non-living things? How would examining anything about the non-living things tell us that the living things exist, or what particular way those living things are alive?
“Explain how consciousness arises from non-conscious matter” doesn’t seem any more of an impossible problem than “Explain how life arises from non-living matter”.
We can define and analyze ‘life’ without any reference to life: As high-fidelity self-replicating macromolecules that interact with their environments to assemble and direct highly responsive cellular containers around themselves. There doesn’t seem to be anything missing from our ordinary notion of life here; or anything that is missing could be easily added by sketching out more physical details.
What might a purely physical definition of consciousness that made no appeal to mental concepts look like? How could we generate a first-person facts from a complex of third-person facts?
Sorry, bad example… Let’s try again.
Can you give me an example of how, even in principle, this would work? Construct a toy universe in which there are living things causally determined by non-living things? How would examining anything about the non-living things tell us that the living things exist, or what particular way those living things are alive?
“Explain how consciousness arises from non-conscious matter” doesn’t seem any more of an impossible problem than “Explain how life arises from non-living matter”.
We can define and analyze ‘life’ without any reference to life: As high-fidelity self-replicating macromolecules that interact with their environments to assemble and direct highly responsive cellular containers around themselves. There doesn’t seem to be anything missing from our ordinary notion of life here; or anything that is missing could be easily added by sketching out more physical details.
What might a purely physical definition of consciousness that made no appeal to mental concepts look like? How could we generate a first-person facts from a complex of third-person facts?