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Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

(disclaimer: I did not yet read the whole paper)

This part stood out to me in their idea of how philosophy views consciousness

> A traditional answer to this problem is dualism — that living entities differ from inanimate ones because they contain some non-physical element such as an “anima” or “soul”.

I believe this makes it sound like philosophers are actively looking for the soul, or another explanation of consciousness that lies outside of 'physics'.

This might be true for some philosophers, but there are other philosophies to adhere to. More contemporary would be the works of Daniel Dennett or John Searle.

Cartesian Dualism is surely something not a lot of philosophers would get behind anymore.

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I understood Searle's "Chinese Room" argument to advocate dualism -- that there's something more to being intelligent than just behavior. Searle says the more is consciousness, but I don't see the distinction between that version of the concept and a soul or "ghost" in the machine.

Searle is actually an advocate for Biological Naturalism, the chinese room was an argument against computationalism (that the brain works like a computer). Though he admittedly does think the brain is a 'biological computer', and they have their differences.

That's how Searle views himself, but one critique of his work is that he can't distinguish his "naturalism" from dualism. It seems so obvious to him that the Chinese Room isn't conscious, but if it can replicate everything a conscious person would do, it might indeed replicate the phenomena of consciousness. How would we know, after all, since those phenomena are not readily observable.

I interpret "soul", "spirit" and such terms as a poetic concept to represent the kernel of being, as in, what defines individuality. If you understand conscience as the flow of conscious states, what defines you should be the persistent aspects of those states, trying to draw a parallel with programming languages, it's spirit would be it's core functions. So, not what kind of information you have or deal with, but how you deal with it.

I just can't understand the search for a metaphysical soul, as it is not an actual search, it's just faith, hope, it's not a reasonable answer or an attempt at one, and I guess a lot of philosophers and poets use the words "soul" and "spirit" with what I said earlier in mind.

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