You can point to a protein being expressed by DNA, and then understand how many protein molecules amount to cells, then tissues, then organs. There is a first principle guiding you all the way, even though the complexity is staggering.
There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the phenomena "consciousness", in the same way that individual transactions amount to a stock market.
Without this first principle, it's just magical thinking disguised in scientific language.
Consciousness is a computation, and neurons are certainly capable of elementary computation.
So the building block has been pointed at (neurons), and its property given (computation). Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?
I have no problem with agreeing that computation can emerge from neurons. For example, one can show how different neural configurations correspond to logic gates, persistent memory (this requires recurrence) and so on. This is precisely what I mean by valid emergentist models. No magic steps, just complexity.
The problem is that you start by stating that "consciousness is a computation", but I don't know if this is true, and neither do you.
> Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?
My problem is that your hypothesis that "consciousness is a computation" is not testable, and so it does not count as a scientific theory (according to the standard Popperian falsifiability criterion).
Unless/until we have a scientific instrument that measures consciousness, we are just assuming things. I assume that other humans are conscious (by analogy), but I don't know it to be true in a scientific sense.
So it's not a matter of what I believe or not, it's a matter of what science can investigate or not. So far, it looks like the phenomenon of consciousness is beyond its grasp.
> With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block.
...it sounded like there were no plausible candidates. If computation is a candidate, then it's certainly something they can point at (with the caveat that it's only a candidate and not currently testable). I think if instead you had written something along those lines and avoided the words "not capable of", then hoseja and I wouldn't have reacted.
This is begging the question. Consciousness is the sheer seeming-ness of my experience. Perhaps it is reducible to computation, perhaps not, but this is precisely what is under contention.
Because then you could also point to 'interactions of transistors' and claim that a computer can be conscious. But this claim has been refuted already.
Do individual cells understand Chinese? What a flawed argument, it doesn't at all address the proposition that consciousness is an emergent property of computation. The guy would, stuck in his room for thousands of years, provide unknowingly the computational fabric for the a potential consciousness of the AI.
No, individual cells don't understand Chinese. Neither would individual transistors if strong AI was possible. But that's not what the argument is about. The argument refutes the notion that you could have a complex (in terms of both hardware and software) system that implements an actual mind. This complex system could act exactly has a real mind on the outside, but would have no semantic parsing (i.e. understanding) on the inside.
