>There is no reason to believe, that we can't do this. A brain is part of our world, governed by physics.
How do you know consciousness is "governed" by our contemporary understanding of physics?
How do you know consciousness is "governed" by our contemporary understanding of physics?
If it's the latter, then the project to explain everything in scientific terms is doomed, because it will always leave something out. If it's the former, then subjectivity is not fundamental, but arises from the objective world. How this is so is a difficult matter (no pun intended).
Either way, there is no magic involved, just a question of where philosophical assumptions begin. You can start with matter or the mind and see where it takes you.
IMO science is doomed to always leave something out as you say.. it will reach a fundamental building block that simply exists, can not be expressed in terms of something else and might as well be called God. But i just haven't heard any convincing arguments that consciousness can't be understood before we reach that point.
Pain is also "subjective", but we understand pain, who it develops and moves in the body, etc.
Plus, that consciousness is subjective is another way of saying we haven't mapped it specifically, so this is a kind of circular logic.
The "subjective" part is just a set of states of an objective construct (the brain, which is a physical object).
Once we know enough to create a synthetic brain, it really doesn't matter what its subjective experience is, we will judge it the same way we judge our fellow humans.
And this is fine since we have no way to truly know the subjective experience of say color for any other human either. Yet we don't question each others claim of consciousness.
It's enough that we can both say "blue" to name the ~ 490–450nm wavelength of light regardless of our personal subjective experience of it.
It doesn't mean we can experience the subjective states of a synthetic brain or another human, but we can definitely replicate the physical aspects of the brain that produce them.
Update:
I'm not sure I'd say supernatural. I think consciousness is different in kind from the rest of how we understand the universe to work. It seems likely that it's a fundamental property of the universe.
I see this all pretty much the same way that the philosopher David Chalmers does. He probably does a better job of explaining it than me. It's worth looking at his thinking on the matter.
Edit:
I think all that philosophy is going to have to be updated when we eventually start having conversations with synthetic brains that can tell us about their sense of consciousness ;-)
Edit 2:
If we had a device that could instantly make a carbon-copy (unintended pun) of a human (let's say me), identical down to the last atom, what you're saying is that copy would NOT be conscious. That it is not enough to capture the physical nature of someone to capture the state of consciousness.. that it is beyond physical. I just don't know how to come to terms with that idea. To me consciousness simply must be a product of our physical bodies and thus within the purview of rational study and comprehension.
However, there is no reason future computers will be limited to current (Turing) technology instead of being a collection of many co-processors with differing capabilities.
The main point though, is that since consciousness is housed in the physical brain, we can dissect, understand, and recreate fully-functional synthetic versions. While each person is in their own subjective world, the brain which is responsible for it is an objective object that is open to study.
That would violate the Church-Turing thesis, which is pretty widely accepted, unless the universe itself is a hypercomputer that we can leverage to perform computation.
But they do, and we can copy them, what is the problem with making a synthetic brain? Why is the natural brain an allowed exception, but the one we make is not allowed?
Edit:
On the one hand you want to use Church-Turing to invalidate the possibility of us creating non-Turing based technology, and yet in a previous post you claimed the human brain likely violates Church-Turing. So which is it? Is reality allowed to violate Church-Turing or is it not?
If you honestly believe that the human brain violates Church-Turing, then you have to explain why you also believe that we can not copy the brain and achieve the same result ourselves.
I do think that I actually agree with your earlier point that once we have a functioning synthetic brain, we can ignore subjective experience itself and just focus on its functional implications for the entire system.
Why?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Is consciousness?
How do you know that this is true?
Our brains are part of this universe, and conciousness is dependent on our brains.
Roughly 68% of the observable universe cannot be explained by physics ("dark matter").
This is neither a logical/mathematical proof, nor an empirically established fact. So how do you know? Why are you making statements of faith in what seems to be the scientific worldview, when the actual scientific worldview is that we should never make statements of faith?
Lets assume there is some sort of physical process involved that we don't understand or even know about (unlikely), it would still be part of the physics that govern our universe.
You're begging the question. Why is "some sort of physical process" the only hypothesis space you're considering?
If the feeling of beeing a clock, winds up a spring in the clock that works a mechanism that feels like fear on beeing predictable (aka exploitable) - that does not make the clock less observable.
What grounds do we have for asserting as certain that consciousness is not a foundational thing-that-simply-is, but must definitely be composed from sub-systems that are themselves non-conscious?
I for once believe that at the neuronal level, the sugar is spun into little pixies that fly around in the brain transfering information.
Dementia is occuring when somebody does no longer believe in fairys - and the little sugar elves die. So its always good to start any conversation on this with "I-do-believe-in-fairys" to keep the memory fresh.