Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

Could you please help me to find a strongman interpretation of idealism?

The question i am primarily interested in, is: "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human".

This is a purely abstract, mathematical question and should be in the purview of science. As far as i understand the answer to this question given by Idealism is that 1. it is not possible, and 2. when it is done it will still be impossible because despite behaving 100% the same as a human it will be something entirely different (a philosophical zombie), because 1 is true by definition.

Perhaps the confusion arises because we are just talking about different things? And you are not interested in either behavior of this kind of Turing machine, or in detailed description of physics of matter in the brain?

> Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it

There are still many interpretations possible, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER_%3D_EPR or the interpretation proposed by Wolfram Physics project (which i rather like), which keeps local realism, but locality is not on R3 but on a graph.

We should start with the question I posed, as this is the crux of the issue here, and without it, everything else here is moot. I will endeavor to set it out as clearly as I can.

As you put great weight on the 'hard problem' being an insurmountable one for (and only for) materialism, I am sure you are well aware of the seminal importance, for that premise, of what has become known as the 'Knowledge Argument' from Frank Jackson's paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia", and in particular, a thought experiment from that paper which goes by several names (such as 'Mary the Neuroscientist'), and which was called, by the philosopher Philip Goff, "the greatest argument against materialism."

This argument has several antecedents, including C. D. Broad's argument that chemistry cannot tell us what ammonia smells like, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, Russells aphorism "it is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." All these arguments are doing essentially the same thing: pumping the intuition that knowing what it is like to see colors (or have any other phenomenal experience) is not something that could ever be learned by studying the physical sciences (I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.)

There is a certain amount of indirection at work here, in specifying only the physical sciences. We get an equally valid question by substituting other academic disciplines for the physical sciences, and in particular, of course, any philosophy of mind: they do not get a pass on this by being anti-materialist, and certainly any philosophy - such as idealism - which is premised first and foremost on the reality and significance of the hard problem, will have to confront this question (among many others) before it can be regarded as the solution to this problem and as providing an explanation of consciousness.

Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism. I am interested in learning, then, what you - and, by extension, idealists - regard as convincing arguments for there being a hard problem for materialism, specifically.

Since you are exactly the molecular machine, nothing more and nothing less, saying "the initial state of my molecular machine made me do it" is same as saying "the initial state of my self made me do it". So it does not mean that you should not be accountable, on the contrary it means that the action was caused by your essence, what makes you you, and not some outside entity or random chance.

As for the free will, it means that the behavior of a molecular machine depends on machine itself, not on far away stars or a random number generator. One can't say that he got unlucky initial state, because he _is_ that unlucky state. Any change of the state would create someone entirely different. Moreover Stephen Wolfram's computational irreducibility principle implies that despite all the information being contained in initial state, only way to extract predictions from that state is to run the molecular machine and observe its behavior.

Why is stress contributing to diseases materialism-inconsistent? In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused.

> Idealism, materialism, dualism, etc. concern theory of mind

Idealism/dualism used to be about other things too. Stepping away from them allowed us to find physics. Now it is concerned with theory of mind only because the other things are explained by physics.

> believed in Aristotle’s takes, too—by being Christian.

I was talking about the actually measurable things he was saying about physics, his takes on soul being successful is irrelevant, since we still do not have any experiment proving that soul exists.

> “does consciousness arise from atoms?”

Science is concerned with the question "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human". This is what most scientists and materialists mean when talking about conciousness.

The other questions are specifically crafted in a way to not have answers, so that idealism/dualism etc. can pretend that they do something useful, while not doing anything.

I don't like being crushed by rocks but I can fight against it all I want, a rock that's heavier than me will crush me.