Time to clear up some things…
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gbob and I have a disagreement. There is no mistake about that. I go with the consensus of physicists that consciousness has nothing whatsoever to do with the measurement problem in quantum physics. And there is a very good reason for this. Numerous experiments have shown that a presence of a conscious observer for a particular measuring device makes no difference whatsoever. We have run complex experiments with multiple measuring devices and wave collapse effects which enables us to isolate the cause for a particular wave collapse in an unobserved measuring device which can be remotely switched on or off. The irrefutable conclusion is that the only thing that changes with conscious observation of a result is not any kind of wave collapse but only the knowledge of the observer and nothing else.
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But despite this disagreement we (gbob and I) also have a great deal in common. Rejecting both materialism and naturalism, we believe in a non-physical or spiritual aspect of reality and that there is a part of us which continues after death. And despite my disagreement with him on number 1, this doesn’t mean I think that quantum physics has nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness. So this is really a matter of the validity of an argument he is making for something we both believe in. As I am frequently required to explain to other Christians, just because what you are arguing for is correct, doesn’t mean the argument itself is valid. Indeed, I think there have been many distortions in Christianity that derives from shifting ones faith from the truths of Christianity to the arguments Christians make for those beliefs.
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There is also some significant differences in the understanding of consciousness between myself, @gbob and @MarkD , where the issue of AI and future possibilities for machine consciousness may be particularly relevant.
gbob: looks for consciousness in quantum physics as a link to something nonphysical. He therefore doesn’t expect consciousness to come about by imitating the human brain, let alone by anything which works by carrying out the instructions of a computer program.
MarkD: looks for consciousness in the emergent subjective experience of biological processes. He doubts that there is any such thing as consciousness apart from this for an AI to achieve.
myself: locate consciousness as a quantitative/additive property of a mathematically describable process of life itself. Therefore I think that the principle flaw in the idea of conscious AI is that consciousness has nothing whatsoever to do with human intelligence and so imitating that will never acquire consciousness. However, this doesn’t exclude the possibility of machine consciousness if we instead seek to imitate the process of life itself.