A timeline of its past lives as a TikZ diagram according to GPT (messed the TikZ initially). Heard a clip of the guy in red who was awarded the Nobel prize, pontificating on consciousness on a podcast. He gave a silly thought experiment paralleling Chalmers’ philosophical zombie:
- Replace every neuron in your brain with an artificial neuron that does the same thing as the original.
- Then ask if you are conscious at every stage.
- You would obviously answer yes.
- From that, he goes on to assert that it is an emergent property of the neural connectivity and not some independent entity.
The interesting thing is that he was never able to say how it emerges beyond waving his hands. It seemed quite apparent that he was simply blind to the explanation gap and the issue of the hard problem. Almost 2 decades ago, I had the same discussion with a prolific condensed matter physicist from an Ivy League school, and he was also simply unable to perceive the gap despite multiple attempts. The same happened again with a neurobiologist and a physicist a few years ago. It is quite interesting that this insight needs something to fundamentally click that might not happen to everyone.
विश्वास-टिप्पनी
How it emerges - body consciousness.
इदम् अन्तर् इदम् बाह्यम्
इति भेदाच् छरीरजात्।
स्व-स्वीय-रक्षणे जीव-
मूलासक्तिस् स्फुटा मयि॥
कोशे काये समाजे ऽपि
लक्ष्य आत्मा यदि स्फुटम्।
प्रत्यक्त्वम् आनुकूल्यं चै-
कत्वं कायाभिमानिता॥