I think people like this are mixing up the hard and soft problems of consciousness. The soft problems are things like figuring out what causes the brain to be awake, retain memories and respond to stimuli. Those can all be all be approached in a scientific way. The hard problem, as far as I can tell, is still far out of reach of scientific understanding.
replyThere’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples.
replyTo name a few you may want to investigate:
John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.
I would also add Iain McGilchrist, Donald Hoffman, Andy Clark, Jeff Hawkins and Jesse Prinz to that list.
replyI'm not questioning whether people have studied consciousness, I'm well aware. I'm talking specifically about moving the goal posts.
replyThere is a modern philosophical agreement that the hard problem depends on qualia by both proponents and critics. So when Daniel Dennett argues against David Chalmers, he attacks the definition of qualia. Or when Keith Frankish argues for illusionism, he attempts to show that consciousness is not actually qualia. And when Nagel says we don't know what it's like to be a bat, he means the bat qualia of echolocation (what it feels like when bats use echolocation to sense the world).
replyThe Turing test comes to mind. It no longer being the gold standard for thinking machines.
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