It has been quite frustrating encountering arguments that have been extensively debated for years be presented as if they were new revelations.
In all my debates with people in the last few years I have primarily taken the position of trying to explain the problems with claims of certainty, and that lack of certainty permits possibility of the opposite. We should act responsibly around what might be possible.
There is also the narrative of "being too obsessed if you could to consider if you should" or similar claims of an unconsidered path forward.
Isaac Asimov wrote the first of the Robot stories in 1940, they were not written in isolation, it came from an awareness of the situation and the questions that must be asked. There was a community considering these issues. Asimov gave the wider public a view of some of those issues.
If we have a hundred years of people going "This is coming, we had better decide what we want it to be" and nobody listens to them, or frequently outright ridicules the need for considering their ideas, why is it now we are placing the blame on those who are now showing some success at what they told us they were attempting all along.
I'm also super curious to learn more about the philosophers you referenced and their thoughts on this subject. Would you be willing to share some of your favorite examples?
0. Descartes/Titchener/Chomsky and friends for background.
1. John Searle featured prominently because of his accessibility. I tended to present his Chinese Room argument as a criticism of symbolic AI alone, though I believe he considered it a criticism of sub-symbolic approaches as well.
2. Thomas Nagel's classic article "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a good introduction to qualia, which is how we describe direct conscious experience.
3. Wittgenstein would be important in terms of the impossibility of empathising with, or seeing things from the perspective of, other minds that have emerged in different contexts (such as animals). However, I rarely spoke about him because, frankly, I couldn't understand him in the original!
4. David Chalmers. Writes clearly (and coined?) the 'hard problem' of consciousness and why subjective experience appears difficult to reconcile with a purely physical account of the mind.
4.1 Daniel Dennett. The clearest and most influential critic of the idea that consciousness presents a special explanatory problem.
5. Darwin and others. Comparative psychology (the study of animal minds) strongly suggests, by showing that the antecedents of the human mind are present in animals, that we should reduce our bias that human minds are special, ineffable, or somehow atomic.
6. Jerry Fodor. Modularity: the idea that the mind is composed of modules that specialise in certain tasks (e.g. phoneme perception, syntactic analysis, face recognition) and operate largely unconsciously unless they are dependent on one another in some way. This helps us take a computational approach to the mind. It reminds us that much of what we do mentally might be expressible in computational terms.
Two final ideas off the top of my head:
1. The Ship of Theseus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
When (not all) neurons die off and are replaced by new ones doing the same job, our sense of self and identity is somewhat cast into doubt. In a physical system, if consciousness is a magic or non-material entity of some kind, what is happening to it during this process?
Is there an accessible way for a layman such as myself to read about some of these ideas (Really I mean philosophical discussion in general) without having to read entire books? Is there an active HN-equivalent or wiki or something?
I’ll mention some more sources in my reply above.
They're not exactly casually absorbed, as in a wiki or forum. But you can read some books that begin to introduce these ideas. On the topic of consciousness, less academic and more slated towards general audience: Reality+ by David Chalmers and Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel and Galileo's Error by Phillip Goff will give you and interesting gamut of ideas.
The thing about arguments in philosophy is that they span from a very old web of thought that has been refined into very sharp positions over a long time. So you will find yourself ever recursively going back to understand ideas and framing with more precision.
This is why it's difficult to casually get into these topics IMO. There's just been so much said and discussed, to understand the current meta (as the gaming folks might say), you have to understand how we arrived at the current meta. And that's a long journey that's never complete!