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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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basically if you stuff enough compute into the prefrontal cortex you get consciousness

There is not one shred of evidence for this.

It is all physical stuff we can understand.

Nope, philosophy and science do not understand why consciousness exists in the least bit. There has been literally zero progress on this front despite enormous efforts.

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/147/3/794/7424860

The prefrontal cortex is so important to human beings that, if deprived of it, our behaviour is reduced to action-reactions and automatisms, with no ability to make deliberate decisions. Why does the prefrontal cortex hold such importance in humans? In answer, this review draws on the proximity between humans and other primates, which enables us, through comparative anatomical-functional analysis, to understand the cognitive functions we have in common and specify those that distinguish humans from their closest cousins.

None of that has anything to do with consciousness, subjective experience. Decision-making ability and consciousness are two different things.

If you haven't already, I suggest that you read about the hard problem of consciousness.

You didn't read the article. Yes it has everything to do with consciousness.

Like what? I see several mentions of consciousness in it but nothing that would even come close to providing information about how the brain gives rise to consciousness (if it even does at all).

I think that your belief that science has made inroads into explaining consciousness is just as unsupported as any Christian's faith.

I am not even sure that you mean the same thing by "consciousness" as I do. I mean subjective experience, qualia. You talk about "self-awareness", which can mean two different things: either an intelligence having a model of itself, or being subjectively aware of oneself. The former has nothing necessarily to do with consciousness, you could theoretically have an intelligence that has a model of itself but has no subjective experience. The latter does.

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