this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I find emergence to be the least reasonable of the 3 main hypotheses I consider, but I still accept that it's possible since I can't disprove it. However, it is illogical to conclude your hypothesis must be true at this stage.
Your comparison proves nothing. It is no different than insisting a radio must be creating the signal it's picking up, because if you poured alcohol or liquid gabapentin all over it, it will no longer be able to play music. I'm sure you realize that if your radio breaks, that doesn't mean the radio signal has disappeared. It is possible our brains are simply interfacing with consciousness rather than inexplicably fabricating it from more than the sum of its parts.
Based on everything science has taught me, it seems far more likely to me that consciousness is not magically created by my brain, but rather one of two things are happening:
My brain is able to interface with a conscious field
Consciousness is a force inherent within the universe, and our brains are able to make use of the force
I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let's say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.
Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which... It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.
In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn't a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can't have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.
Your example is a really really good one.
This statement begins with the assumption that the brain produces consciousness, then says that because the thing that produces consciousness has components, that it can't be fundamental. This is a really really good example of circular logic.
Where "magic" means "I don't understand a single bit of information theory, computer science, suchlike".
Something becoming more than the sum of its parts to such a degree would indeed be magic. Are you claiming we're AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT? Are information and consciousness synonymous? I would say that one of us indeed doesn't understand the complexity of the situation.
No, those are T2 systems and we're (at least) T3 systems, roughly speaking we don't have pre-programmed methods of learning and can generate behaviour from that, but we have pre-programmed methods of learning how to learn to generate behaviour. Notice the additional "learn". T4 if you count evolution itself as a further level, learning that which is pre-programmed in us.
Practopoiesis is currently the best model we have, incorporating all the neurological and psychological data we have in a cybernetic understanding of things respecting (as cybernetics generally does) issues of computability and complexity theory. Trying to replicate the information processing capacity of the human brain with our current AI tech, all T2 systems, indeed would require computers (or brains) the size of multiple planets. It'd also make us prone to forget how to play piano when learning to cook pasta as compartmentalisation of learning requires said capacity to learn how to learn, to encode things in distinct ways and not just smear everything into an overgeneralised whole, overwriting unrelated information.
Now that would be rather strange and terminally fuzzy. You could say that consciousness is a by-product of information processing. Best I can put it (and this is meditation experience, not fancy science) is that the field of consciousness is a point of different information processing systems coalescing, integrating their individual results. A committee meeting room of sorts. We like to identify with that and think it's oh so important but, eh, is it really? I mean the identification, not the coalescing and integrating. If the experience was not present but its function was still fulfilled, what would change in practice? Are you sure that none of those sub-systems contributing to your consciousness aren't themselves conscious, you generally just don't notice it because there's no need to? If your motor cortex cracks a knuckle and you're not around to notice it, did it really crack a knuckle?