To add my own highly anecdotal evidence: my experience is that most people with a background in computer science or physics have no active model of how consciousness maps to brains, but when prodded they indeed usually come up with some form of functionalism*.
My own position is that I’m highly confused by consciousness in general, but I’m leaning slightly towards substance dualism, I have a background in computer science.
*: Though note that quite a few of these people simultaneously believe that it is fundamentally impossible to do accurate natural language parsing with a turing machine, so their position might not be completely thought through.
This seems a bit like trying to fix a problem by applying a patch that causes a lot more problems. The stunning success of naturalistic explanations so far in predicting the universe (plus Occam’s Razor) alone would enough to convince me that consciousness is a naturalistic process (and, in fact, they were what convinced me, plus a few other caveats). I’d assign maybe 95% probability to this conclusion. Still, I’d be interested in hearing what led you to your conclusion. Could you expand in more detail?
To add my own highly anecdotal evidence: my experience is that most people with a background in computer science or physics have no active model of how consciousness maps to brains, but when prodded they indeed usually come up with some form of functionalism*.
My own position is that I’m highly confused by consciousness in general, but I’m leaning slightly towards substance dualism, I have a background in computer science.
*: Though note that quite a few of these people simultaneously believe that it is fundamentally impossible to do accurate natural language parsing with a turing machine, so their position might not be completely thought through.
This seems a bit like trying to fix a problem by applying a patch that causes a lot more problems. The stunning success of naturalistic explanations so far in predicting the universe (plus Occam’s Razor) alone would enough to convince me that consciousness is a naturalistic process (and, in fact, they were what convinced me, plus a few other caveats). I’d assign maybe 95% probability to this conclusion. Still, I’d be interested in hearing what led you to your conclusion. Could you expand in more detail?