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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

Are brains responsible for consciousness? Or are brains a tool that our consciousness uses to understand the world?

you might as well call consciousness a soul at this point.

something I once wondered about is what a soul can be and what implications it would have. the conclusions I drew is that the entire concept was incoherent. if a soul is so intrinsically linked to the brain (experience) such that it always goes along for the ride even into the abyss (eg. dementia) then it by itself wouldn't have any value even if it existed.

They seem to be. But that argument doesn't matter much because you can simulate the whole body. (If you want to argue consciousness is outside the body, I could get into the physics argument but instead I'll just claim that consciousness will attach to the computer too and if you have a reason it wouldn't it's your burden to say why.)

I don’t know where consciousness is but I think if we accept that you can simulate a brain exactly that doesn’t prove consciousness of a model as consciousness is a metaphysical concept really

This seems like a different topic from whether consciousness "uses" the brain?

But I will point out we don't have a way to prove anything is conscious, not even a human.

Consciousness appears to be a biological phenomenon, but so too are metabolism, reproduction and evolution. Are these also metaphysical concepts?

Consciousness does not appear to be biological, that is an opinion and a highly debated one

Where does it appear outside of biology?

Where does consciousness appear in biology? It’s a philosophical/metaphysical concept so far as I can tell

The one thing that I think all philosophers agree on is that the only confirmed cases of consciousness discovered so far are biological. They are divided over whether there is anything fundamentally more metaphysical about it than other biological phenomena (with Dennett having been the best-known dissenter, though he has many successors), and the debate has been going on without resolution for centuries, if not millennia.

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