Merely substituting “experiencing” with “being conscious”, doesn’t really help much. A tin can can experience getting kicked, yet is hardly conscious of it. “Being aware” is a better substitute, but it is still too unexplicative. What is required of something such as to say that it is aware, experiencing, or conscious? That is the mystery to which they were referring.
I define consciousness as the process of remote recognition. If anything can detect, locate, and identify something else then it is aware of, conscious of, and experiencing the presence of that something. To be more obviously conscious, it must be in the process of detecting many things, perhaps objects in a room, facial expressions, or movements and detecting them as separate from itself (hence “remote”). The act of being conscious of a terrain is the act of continuously maintaining a map for a terrain with which decisions concerning further actions can be made.
Anything or anyone maintaining that activity is conscious of a specific terrain, yet perhaps unaware or unconscious of other terrains.
But the problem with defining precisely what consciousness is, is similar to defining what a god is - people want to argue and no authority is willing to step up and declare precisely what the word is to mean. The mystery is willingly maintained. Thus in any detailed discussion, the participants must settle between themselves what the word is going to mean during their discussion. Without such agreements upon the meanings of the words, vague inferences lead merely to endless bantering.
If you agree with Strawson that we can’t even begin to understand the physical goings-on that give rise to consciousness, then how can you know that artificial consciousness will never be possible?
If you do have reason be be able to make such a strong claim, then you must have an idea about why the biochemical processes of consciousness are not possibly repeatable in another format, ever.
Ok, but then you aren’t talking about what other people are talking about when they talk about consciousness.
So, you go to Google or MIT or whatever and say “look, I made a conscious machine, it can detect, locate and identify something else”. They aren’t going to be much impressed, because that isn’t what people generally mean by “conscious”.
I said in my last post but one: if we can discover the precise causal mechanisms we may be able to produce consciousness in other media.
And I tried to explain why that other medium (or format as you put it) won’t be computation.
Actually I am speaking of exactly what they are bantering about. The difference is that I understand of what consciousness is made. But then as I said, everyone prefers to argue. You still haven’t given a sufficient definition to use instead.
And that is why Turing proposed his “Turing Test”. If I built a machine that did exactly what I said and people could not distinguish it from a living being, no one at MIT or Google is going to argue any longer. But then of course, among the masses, arguing never ends.
Computational or not has nothing to do with it.
It certainly makes sense that if artificial consciousness is possible it shouldn’t take another 200 million years to create it. Evolution is like trial and error without a memory. Human ingenuity has made quite a lot possible over the past 5 thousand or so years, and particularly in the last 300 of those. If consciousness is the result of neural activity what seems unscientific or irrational about using any combination of vacuum tubes and transistors to accurately model such activity?
That sounds fair. Both people and machines are working on it.
I’d like to ask you to consider what you mean by “model” here.
A computer could be used to “model” digestion: do you think it would scientific or rational to expect that to result in the consumption, processing and excretion of food?
A computer could be used to “model” Storm Barbara, currently shaking the branches of the trees here: would you expect that modelling to result in strong winds and heavy rain?
Sure, I get your point. Even so, accurate modeling is itself a powerful thing. And I’m sure we’ll proceed with simpler versions before the more complex. That is why it is good to discern more clearly what counts as consciousness and if we can figure out a general theory as to how it arises.
Those are not valid questions to the issue. They are, in effect, strawmen. You are conflating software with hardware.
• A machine could be a model of digestion and that machine would probably do a better job of digesting than your body would have (else why bother with designing it).
• A machine could be a model of a storm and probably yield more devastating results than a natural storm.
• And a machine could have a program within that is a model of a conscious mind (or even a human mind) and be more conscious than any natural organic life form.
“We” already know how it arises and it is already being done. The only problem is that in the “we vs them” issue, you are not “we”.
Oh dear James! Nearly 24000 posts on this philosophy forum, and yet your thinking is so painfully disordered.
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Think about what people are referring to in the real world when they talk about a computer modelling something. The computer just sits there on the desk, with numbers appearing on the screen.
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There are machines that can digest waste, but this isn’t “modelling digestion”, it is digestion.
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Your question “else why bother with designing it” is just loopy. Did you think it through at all, or do you just write down whatever pops into your head? Life would be a lot easier if just bothering to design something meant that it would work extremely well, but that’s not how the world works. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
This seems pretty much like a delusion. It is not yet known how consciousness arises. It’s common knowledge that we don’t know that. The idea that a person like you could be “in the know” while all these researchers and philosophers are still in the dark about it is just laughable. Ideas like this make it impossible to take you seriously.
Merry Christmas to Christian humans and Christian machines! 
Merry xmass.
Btw I have solved how to make machines conscious, you just take e.g. a fly or birds brain from fetal stem cells, and grow them in a fractal mesh of veins delivering what it needs [blood and nutrients, oxygen etc]. now you got something looking through the camera lens at you, and operating its machine body. Got that [the body] covered too lol.
Reminds me of the teenager telling the old man how naive he is. 
How about you think about what fuse was talking about when he mentioned modeling. He wasn’t talking about a computer sitting on a desk. Perhaps after a few thousand posts, you will learn how to read as well. … or maybe not. Although I’m sure that you believe that you already know how … despite the evidence.
When a machine digests in the same manner as a human digests, it is modeling the human digestion, without being a human. You are conflating “simulation” with “modeling”. “Modeling” means “making a likeness of”, not simulating in a computer, although in the case of making a likeness of a mind in a computer, it merely takes simulating a mind because there are no physical elements involved in a mind (which is why all of your retorts were nonsense strawmen - look it up). The model merely uses different physical elements to arrange for the same mental processes - a likeness.
I see that you are socially and psychologically naive as well as philosophically. But that is both a different thread as well as a different forum. People design machines specifically to do the things that men cannot do. That is precisely why they keep getting better and better at everything - because people design them that way for a purpose.
Interesting. I say that something is known - can be verified.
You say that something is not known - cannot be verified.
People like that are difficult to “take seriously”, especially when they can’t even define what it is that they are talking about. 
But Merry Christmas anyway. 
He was talking about producing consciousness using some combination of transistors and vacuum tubes, after I had pointed out that computers could be made out of different kinds of things like that. So he was talking precisely about a computer sitting at a desk.
Like most words these have a range of meanings, I would guess it is more common to say “modelling on a computer” than “simulating on a computer”.
The question whether there are physical elements in the mind has been a major preoccupation of philosophers certainly since the time of Descartes. Your suggestion that I could go and look up the answer somewhere makes it seem as though you are completely unaware of the ongoing debate. You assume the truth of Cartesian Dualism, that the world consists of two substances, mind and matter, that matter is not mind and mind is not matter.
There are many other views. Materialism, idealism, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, neutral monism, etc etc.
The problem (well one of them) is that consciousness is associated with these very specific processes in the brain, and there’s really no reason to think that vacuum tubes and also transistors would produce the same effects.
There are chemicals that make a mind. When science can mimic those chemicals then you will have individuals. Chemicals and experience creates.
Transcriptors.
To someone having no idea of what he speaks, I’m sure such would seem true.
Machines deprive millions people of work, they do. But still people servу the cyborgs
Afterall, it was noticed that people strive after genuine art which can’t be reproduced by robots.
Possibly but, where would emotion come in? Even the smallest animals have emotions, likes and dislikes that individualize them.