- Dr Bruce Long
Okay I will retweet it and then read it. However, it really just sounds like what I do when I ask things like "A-consciousness or p-consciousness?" and say things like "I have no idea if a system of digitally-statistically-algorithmically-simulated-emulated Hebbian neural networks which provably achieves functional emulation of the human natural kind cognition per multiple realisability is necessarily a-conscious, but per Ned Block there is no in-principle reason why it can't be."
I am grateful also for David Chalmers' earlier post:
https://2/status/2112535732388598001?s=20
Which says roughly just that. Watch closely: There's NO IN-PRINCIPLE reason why such an emulation of Hebbian neural networks can't be Ned-Blockian access conscious. This means there is no LOGICAL, NOMIC, or EMPIRICAL block stopping it being the case, and claims to the contrary are automatically too strong. There's similarly no in-principle reason that Blockian a-consciousness isn't a sufficient condition for Blockian p-consciousness as Block (1996) also noted, but don't ask me to be as sure about p-consciousness as Chalmers.
Producing convincing empirical evidence one way or another is the hard thing.
I cheekily told my students that Chalmers is a non-reductive physicalist, but he's really a non-physicalist, naturalistic dualist. Yet as a somewhat reductionist physicalist I can agree with the statement about Blockian a-consciousness having no in-principle blocks against it in a multiple realisability setting. (My cheeky statement to my students was because I am not convinced that supervenience is not just reduction with an epistemic access problem in disguise. Of course Chalmers would be able to make this sound silly, probably.)
