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Comment by serhei | Hacker News Reader

Both the Lucas-Penrose argument and the counterarguments seem to assume that consciousness is a phenomenon within the laws of physics which arises from more fundamental laws (e.g. chemistry or quantum mechanics), which is (to me) a completely non-obvious assumption.

For example, I perceive my own thoughts rather than other people's. This implies that my own thoughts would have an additional physical property, that of being perceived by me, which the thoughts of other people lack. However, according to all up-to-date theories of physics and neurology, there is no difference between my own thoughts and other people's that would explain the presence of this additional property.

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Aren't your own thoughts similar to a CPU's registers or cache? One's thoughts seem to occur within the context of the brain and the billions of neighboring (to the ones inducing the current "thought") neurons. Its as obvious to me that you can't perceive another's thoughts just as surely as one CPU can't "perceive" the registers of another.

The perception of ones own thoughts seems very physical, as is the equally obvious (to me) explanation that you can't directly perceive the thoughts of another.

For you to perceive your thoughts doesn't require different properties to other people's thoughts. Just different values to common properties.

It's not clear why you would expect this to be inherently different from any other neurological response. For example, if I stub my toe, are you suggesting that science doesn't have an answer to why you don't feel it?

If I turn the light on in my closet with the door closed, can anyone explain why you can't see it?

I am suggesting that the fact that I (the perceiving subject) am myself (the biological entity) rather than you (a different biological entity, but ostensibly subject to the same laws) is (a) an objective fact (b) not within the domain of science. I do not expect this fact to map to any observable physical properties.

It's because the thing generating the thoughts (you) is coupled to the thing perceiving the thoughts (you) via pathways that can carry the information. I, however, am not connected to that thing (you) via equivalent pathways.

I am, as luck would have it, connected in a more or less identical fashion to the thing creating my thoughts (me).

Physics is ok with all of that.

(b) not within the current domain of science.

There's no current evidence that it is fundamentally outside that domain.

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