The thing is your story seems more to confirm the scientific consensus around consciousness as connected to the physical existence of the brain. You describe how ancient medicine functioned through trial and error. Some times they came up with stuff that worked, more often than not they didn’t, and they had no way of knowing why a cure worked until scientific progress had discovered the underlying explanations for it. So when they found a cure that just happened to work on a certain disease, they would apply it for all sorts of diseases, or lacking proper diagnosis, would mistake other diseases for the disease it worked on and so forth.
It was blind chance without any actual useful theory behind it. Now we have useful theory which explains why consciousness would be linked to the physical cognitive functions of a brain, and less and less that would explain how it could exist without it.
What we have are correlations, not causation. We still cannot point to a part of the brain and say “There it is, there’s conciousness.”
One theory is the idea that if enough brain power is gathered together it makes a conciousness as an emergent property.
Except, why can’t we make an AI? Why is it that putting a bunch of processors together doesn’t give us skynet? Why are chatbots that spew regurgitation the best we can do?
Where is the emerging conciousness in the AI?
We will never have it, because we are still missing what makes humans concious. At some point we need to stop laughing at the idea that it could be in some way quantum or undetectable and ask why neurology can’t answer the hard question.
The thing is your story seems more to confirm the scientific consensus around consciousness as connected to the physical existence of the brain. You describe how ancient medicine functioned through trial and error. Some times they came up with stuff that worked, more often than not they didn’t, and they had no way of knowing why a cure worked until scientific progress had discovered the underlying explanations for it. So when they found a cure that just happened to work on a certain disease, they would apply it for all sorts of diseases, or lacking proper diagnosis, would mistake other diseases for the disease it worked on and so forth.
It was blind chance without any actual useful theory behind it. Now we have useful theory which explains why consciousness would be linked to the physical cognitive functions of a brain, and less and less that would explain how it could exist without it.
What we have are correlations, not causation. We still cannot point to a part of the brain and say “There it is, there’s conciousness.”
One theory is the idea that if enough brain power is gathered together it makes a conciousness as an emergent property.
Except, why can’t we make an AI? Why is it that putting a bunch of processors together doesn’t give us skynet? Why are chatbots that spew regurgitation the best we can do?
Where is the emerging conciousness in the AI?
We will never have it, because we are still missing what makes humans concious. At some point we need to stop laughing at the idea that it could be in some way quantum or undetectable and ask why neurology can’t answer the hard question.