Personally I think it’s silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience… Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.
I’ve been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism… Maybe I am just tripping idk
Well, isn’t there? There’s a pretty massive amount of matter, particles flying around whose positions and velocities are all entangled because of their interactions, much like the particles in any mechanical system.
There isn’t exactly one in the brain, either. It’s like how in a computer’s CPU there’s not really any individual part that you can single out as “doing the computing.” There’s special purpose registers, general purpose registers, a control unit, a data path, an ALU, and so on. These things, by their interactions, cause computing to happen. As far as we know, a central nervous system is the same. There’s a huge number of neurons that are interacting with each other, some parts of the central nervous system appear to be linked to some specific function like long term memory, visual processing, etc; but you can’t really point to a way in which there’s a specific physical property of neurons that enables consciousness, as you said.
IMO I don’t think there’s a good way to dismiss the conclusion that very large physical systems like planet earth, or even the entire universe, interact in a way that’s not fundamentally different from how a brain interacts with itself, so unless there’s something other than the physical interactions between neurons at play, they must be able to experience the same consciousness.
There is no “enabling” consciousness. Consciousness is simply first person experience. The hum of the machine. It’s all calculations all at once aimed toward homeostasis. We can pick away every sense you have until there is no consciousness left.
Consciousness seems to be agentic. A unified experience that the universe obviously doesn’t have because we are subjectively experiencing it.
We can certainly point to specific physical properties that prevent consciousness from ever arising. If I snap froze your brain you would lose consciousness, if we snap unfroze you you would resume consciousness from the moment we unfroze you.
Are all computational devices conscious? If not, why not?
I do think we will recreate consciousness by computer means, our current computers are not conscious as we currently define it as they do not really attempt to achieve homeostasis.