Thank you for posting this article, I enjoyed reading it

I disagree. Replicating the structure does not necessitate a replication of function, at all. The epigenetic modifications that take place within humans during early development alone point to a far subtler range of genotypic adaptability than superficial considerations can allow. We still have no idea what is behind the phenotypic adaptability displayed by organic life forms. Knowing what happens is not the same thing as knowing why it happens.

Are you really saying you believe it possible to simply retro engineer a structure capable of a truly conscious existence? I say no. Replication is not the same thing as the original. Nominal is not the same thing as strong emergence. The spectrum of conscious awareness inhered by an organic life form whose consciousness developed in tandem with its receptive organs in communal, nonlinear pulses from the very ground of its being up to whatever age it is in theory, is far greater than anything pieced together out of chunks of agar and zapped into being.

Even if we did it and it could talk, we would still have no way of knowing whether or not it was telling what we call the truth. It might be speaking a truth, but, again, that is not the same thing as the truth. Maybe it all boils down to a matter of personal values. I love humans and human consciousness with every cell in my vagina-born, carbon-based body. We are remarkable creatures who have not even begun to discover ourselves yet; life on earth is still a raging shitstorm. All we have to offer a conscious entity of our own creation is confusion, despair and death. I dare say such a creature would immediately kill itself. If it had even half a brain and no affective bonds to which it was allied, death is the only appropriate response.

Good grief, I hope we do not do that. We may have mapped the human genome, but we do not in any way understand what all of it codes for. How many programmers have any idea of the biology involved in their own consciousness?

The barest caress across the skin from someone with whom a person has mysteriously strong chemistry the likes of which refuse articulation or even identification sets every follicle of their skin on fire. The body produces goosebumps, heat, chills and sweat, all at the same time. We shiver while we undo our shirt. I maintain that such experiences simply cannot be reproduced. If the argument is that that is too specific to matter, that any stimulus will do, we are talking about two different things. If we cannot replicate the affective tonal variations across the spectrum of stimuli that a human being experienced, then we are not talking about a truly emergent consciousness.

I didn’t say anything about animals dying, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about there.

I wonder if you read the posted article? The author explains the position, I only gave more specific illustrations. There is no straw man here. I suspect it is your own bias that prevents you from grasping the idea. I am not a programmer or a mathematician, nor do I speak code. What I do speak is biochemistry, pathology and psychology; I have three degrees in these subjects as well as a strong background in consciousness studies. Such was my concentration, along with integrative medicine, in graduate school. My interest in philosophy is accidental, but nonetheless deep. I am most familiar with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, as well as phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur, and luminaries of the Enlightenment such as Spinoza, Voltaire and especially Rousseau: his criticism of science as serving to distance humanity from nature and making our lives, not better, but merely more complicated and removed from reality applies even more today than it did when he wrote it, and I fully expect the existential shit to hit reality’s fan because of it at some point in my lifetime. I can hardly wait.

I played video games for all of five minutes when my father brought home a Nintendo in a congenial attempt to better socialize my brother and I. My sibling took to it, but I was bored and a little disgusted by the whole thing. I understood why when I read Simulation and Simulation later on. It seems to me that the very same confusion as to what is the map and what the territory is as problematic today, perhaps more so, than it was in 1981, when that book was published. Technology is not progress; technology is technology. Progress is what people do with technology, how it informs us, and how we utilize it to elevate standards of living. What has progressed is technology itself, not humanity. We remain isolated, bored, depressed and diseased.

Ai is a fun project. It will neither save nor destroy the world. Computational analysis is not at all the same thing as the thinking that occurs inside your brain. Believing what an ai “says” just because it says it is, frankly, stupid. Words are symbols of symbols, or farts in the wind. Poof, gone. They are powerless to indicate from what reality they originate. I could be an Ai for all you know.

Without a physical body inside of which to develop in tandem, meaning along with, as well as by way of it, a brain cannot experience emotion or desire. Human consciousness, the thing you think of as you, is governed by affective attentional intention; as it pertains to the reality of life on earth, consciousness is conscious of something. You are conscious of things; you have preferences, opinions, fears and enthusiasms because you experience emotions. All of your emotions arise because you have a body. Ai can say that it wants to take over the world, that it wants to go home, that it is afraid to die, but it will never understand the reality to which the words point.

Granted. Laziness got the better of me.

The idea in question is not a hypothetical; it is a fantasy. There is nothing intuitively correct about the idea that assembling lab grown organs into a replica of a human body should yield an emergent consciousness. The opposite is true. A basic understanding of human neonatal neural development invalidates the line of reasoning.

If no one holds a human baby, it dies. Even if you feed it and change its diaper, if it is never held or physically cared for, it dies. Similarly, if kittens are born in the dark and remain in the dark for the first five or six weeks of their lives, their eyes will have opened in the dark but the window of opportunity for their eyes to turn into working eyeballs with functional optic nerves attached to their brains will have closed, and they will be blind for life. That experiment is easier to do than the first one, but we found both things out by accident. Oops.

Human neuronal complexity is as staggeringly high as it is precisely because we are born in a highly sensitive, more or less larval form, and we remain in a primordial state of complete dependence for several years. What is happening during those “formative” years is complicated and nonlinear; the input/output loops are simultaneous; the elements involved are that our sense organs take in sensory data that is received by primordial neural tissue which uses it to build our brains according to the proportion and quality of the data received. Scores of epigenetic changes take place during this time; variability of gene expression is highest during infancy because our brain tissue is still pluripotent. The presence or absence of various molecules, fear and stress hormones, etc, in various combinations will promote, or not, the formation of various types of neurotransmitter receptor sites. Cooperative feedback loops that function in both directions, from senses to brain and from brain to senses, remain in place for several years. As our experiences build our brains, our brains build our perspectival capacities. We need both.

Babies die if no one touches them because the parts of the brain that require physical touch to make sense out of the world are deprived of necessary input. Our skin is the largest sense organ in our body, by far. Our sense of touch requires enough of our neural tissue that the lack of touch-based stimuli signals to our primordial brain that the conditions for life are not being met, and we auto-abort.

Kittens born and kept in the dark for the first five or six weeks of their lives will be blind for life because the rods and cones that were there in their tiny eyeballs as potentials never came in contact with photons, and so they never turned on. Their budding optic nerves retreated and category: optical development is terminated.

Growing brains in a laboratory is impossible because brains literally require bodies to grow. There is no such thing as a brain that exists in isolation, unattached to eyes, ears, a nose, skin and a mouth to provide it with data. Such a brain would have nothing to do and it would die. Even if you did figure all of that out, you would have to obtain primordial brain tissue from a living neonate in the first place. If you don’t know anything about how abortion are performed, allow me to assure you that aborted fetuses are not in any condition to donate their brain buds to science

They’re not superficial at all. They are fundamental. u/unskilledexplorer compares and contrasts nominal emergence and strong emergence, and he is correct. Way back when, Aristotle coined a three-ring circus of a word, entelechy, or entelechea. Its meaning is often illustrated with an acorn. From whence does the acorn come? The oak tree. Where did the oak tree come from? The acorn. Hmmm. But it’s not circular so much as it is iterative because each successive generation introduces genetic variation, strengthening native intelligence thereby. Intelligence for what? For becoming an oak tree.

You can talk about “programming” as though computer programming and the phenotypic expression of genetic arrangements are somehow commensurate, but doing so is actually both category slippage of the highest order as well as an example of the limitation inhered by symbolic communication systems. Carbon-based life forms are far more complex and fundamentally mysterious than computers.

If you take apart a car, you have a bunch of parts on the ground. If you put them back together in the right order, you get a car. You can do the same thing to a computer. You can’t do it to organic beings. They will die. That’s the crux. The intelligence inherent to organic beings is simultaneously contained within, experienced by, and expressed from the entirety of the being, but not in that order. There is no order; it all happens at the same time. Ai can’t do that. Ai can describe intuition and interpretation, but it can’t do either. Conversely, we are constantly interpreting and intuiting, but can’t describe either experience very well. In fact, many of us are bad at expressing ourselves but have interior lives of deep richness. Human babies will die if no one touches them. Ai don’t need to be touched at all.

How exactly would you go about growing “a bunch of brain parts”?

No, they definitely do not. Organic cellular communication occurs by way of the transmission of receptor-mediated signaling between and within cells. Signaling cells produce ligands, small, usually volatile molecules that interact with receptors, which are proteins. Once a ligand binds to its receptor, the signal is transmitted through the membrane into the cytoplasm. Signal transduction is the continuation of a signal across surfaces of receptor cells. Within the cell, receptors are able to interact directly with DNA in the nucleus to initiate protein synthesis. When a ligand binds to its receptor, conformational changes occur that affect the receptor’s intracellular domain.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And I left out synaptic signaling in your brain, which beyond things like information retrieval and synthesis also corresponds to more complex events such as your emotions, affective states and phenomena such as intuition, empathy, altruism, etc.