It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?

> A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.

And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?

Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.

Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).

That's the hard problem.

Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.

I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.

The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.

They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.

God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.

But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.

> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.

It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.

The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.

[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".

I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.

Hey you give Nvidia a few million years to evolve their chips and just see what happens