I think you’ve failed at that. I don’t think you’ve made ANY progress toward showing consciousness is impossible on transistors (nor on variations of neural connectedness, nor in the Sun). You’ve asserted (correctly IMO), but not shown that it may be possible to have human-level behaviors without consciousness. Kind of—the fundamental dissonance that I experience things which I cannot prove to others nor measure objectively in them remains, and the only thing I can say for sure is “eh, I don’t know, but they sure seem conscious, and I don’t know what would PREVENT those feelings in sufficiently-complex transistor processing”.
I also don’t think the case for “computationalism is only accepted because of Christian heritage” is very well-made either. At least I am not convinced—that’s just one of many possibilities for the causality arrows of untestable beliefs.
What about the evolution of nervous systems needing will at the bottom? The guy in Searle’s Chinese Room? I think I should probably work on those a bit. And be a bit more charitable towards Hofstadter too.
I think you’ve failed at that. I don’t think you’ve made ANY progress toward showing consciousness is impossible on transistors (nor on variations of neural connectedness, nor in the Sun). You’ve asserted (correctly IMO), but not shown that it may be possible to have human-level behaviors without consciousness. Kind of—the fundamental dissonance that I experience things which I cannot prove to others nor measure objectively in them remains, and the only thing I can say for sure is “eh, I don’t know, but they sure seem conscious, and I don’t know what would PREVENT those feelings in sufficiently-complex transistor processing”.
I also don’t think the case for “computationalism is only accepted because of Christian heritage” is very well-made either. At least I am not convinced—that’s just one of many possibilities for the causality arrows of untestable beliefs.
What about the evolution of nervous systems needing will at the bottom? The guy in Searle’s Chinese Room? I think I should probably work on those a bit. And be a bit more charitable towards Hofstadter too.