>>13922726Well, you could also say that the
>>13921038 did not do much either to clarify or argue for his position, and I'm asking for clarification.
Anyway, my main point would be in response to this:
>There is no level of detail you can add to your physical model that will bridge that gap.What exactly would satisfy you that the gap has been bridged? I have a feeling that many people who say things like this, will not be satisfied as long as they don't have first-person access to the other consciousness under consideration. I think that's an unreasonable demand. All we can and should hope for is a theory that can tell us when another organism is conscious (and various details like what it is conscious of and by how much, if "by how much" turns out to make sense at all). But then people could always say that we haven't really bridged the gap between, say, an insect's consciousness and our own, because we still don't have first-party subjective access to the perspective of the insect. It's not clear to me what these people really want. Should we try to connect the insect brain to the human brain by technical means? Would they like to have a magical way of taking another organism's perspective, then return to their own while retaining memories of the other subject? I can't think of anything that is not unreasonable or just absurd.
It's reasonable to take humans at face value when they say they are conscious. In theory it should be possible to find out the conditions that make a person claim they are conscious, without needing first-party access to their perspective. Unless we are playing silly tricks (e.g. just make a computer program that prints out "I am conscious!" every 5 secs) it seems this could be a starting point for solving the "hard" problem.
