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Comment by RobertRies | Hacker News Reader

"The emerging properties model is not unfeasible, we could test it"

One thing you can do is disrupt the smaller individual components that make up the emergent property, and see if the property continues to exist.

I.e. you can put a motorized egg beater in your brain, and see if you still have the emergent properties of consciousness. My prediction is that the property will suddenly disappear.

Or can cut off blood to the brain for a little while.

The counter-argument will be that the consciousness unrecognizably changes, and once the blood comes back, that configuration of matter generally restores. None of this is convincing to me in any way, and I genuinely desperately want someone (a panpsychist) to explain how I'm thinking about this incorrectly.

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If I cut out the antenna of my radio, radio waves don't cease to exist. I just broke a perfectly good radio. There are also many ways to break a radio that have nothing to do with its ability to capture radio waves.

I'm not implying consciousness is some mythical undiscovered force. My point is: How would you know if the components that you are toying with are indeed relevant to consciousness and not some proxy or supporting structure?

The answer is: you can't know. You can reach lesser conclusions (under the effect of drug X, area Y of the brain has decreased activity, resulting in change of behavior Z), but it says nothing about that subjective experience I mentioned earlier (qualia).

I don't doubt we could brute force this into a meaningful discovery, carefully mapping each part of the brain until we figure it out completely, including qualia. We're not there yet though.

While I don't like the radio analogy, I think we largely agree then.

If interested, the reason I don't like the radio analogy is that it presupposes that the configuration of the brain, and inputs isn't fundamentally the constituents of consciousness.

On the flip side, to fix the analogy: if I cut off the antenna of a radio, I would argue it ceases to become a radio by any reasonable definition (assuming we're talking about a device that receives radio waves and plays them back in the form of sound). You just have something that's very close to a radio. It has nothing to do with whether radio waves exist or don't.

As long as you agree that it's conceivable that there's experimentation (brute force or otherwise), then I think we're on the same page.

I'm not willing to abandon reproducibility, so I'm not on the "let's just philosophize and stuff" side, although I think it's relevant to do so.

I think the onus is on the brain folks. In order to solve this, they need to prove that qualia lives as an emergent property in the brain. I'm not presuposing tht the consciousness lives somewhere outside the brain, I'm asking for proof that it does (which is reasonable).

What we have is proof of neither and no way to get there. The reductionist approach offers a more systematic way of approaching the problem, but there are no guarantees. Breaking down a problem into smaller questions is not a proof if there are still smaller questions unanswered.

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