I agree with your general premise, these "scientists" claiming that rocks are conscious seems more like some new age faux spiritualism than anything based on actual empirical data or observation.
What gets interesting is when things like neural networks get advanced enough to properly simulate consciousness, at what point does a bunch of code stop being different than the bunch of neurons in the human brain?
more like some new age faux spiritualism than anything based on actual empirical data or observation.
Haven't you seen the white-papers coming out of research in the last few decades? This is modern science now.
Unfortunately, yes.
How low can academia be stomped into the ground by overzealous dogmatists and their jewish masters?
Well, as we have seen with Lysenko, at least until tens of millions stave to death.
when things like neural networks get advanced enough to properly simulate consciousness, at what point does a bunch of code stop being different than the bunch of neurons in the human brain?
The problem with this (and what Penrose proposed) is that it presupposes that physical processes cause consciousness. It may be that consciousness came before matter, and matter is a development of it, rather than the other way around.
It's important to properly define consciousness before starting to make any claims about it at all. What are it's parameters? Does it exist on a scale of development (i.e. are there varying degrees of simple and more complex forms of it)? Where does it reside? Is it holistic? Is it divisible?
If a neural network were to be designed that was conscious (by whatever definition we give it), would it be a property of the software, the hardware, or both?
Just some thoughts....
Never. Code is software, software will never be sentient, it could only simulate it more or less accurately. Code is informational, like saying a cooking recipe could become sentient. Neurons are physical, hardware. Everything in the brain is hardware, or in this case, wetware.
But physical neural networks, as in neuromorphic computers? Now you're talking.
The hardware doesn't matter. You can be using Conway's game of life, computers, or the human brain to do the data processing and computation. It's called substrate independence. It's the same kind of thing in the end. If your computational device can do universal computation it is able to emulate computation on any other device. The brain does data processing and so does a computer, and there is no reason why the computer can't emulate the brain.
A computer is good at memory retrieval and computational speed, but can't deal with purely subjective data like the human brain can. It can only handle functions that are already built into it, and no one has ever produced even a conceptual design for one that can evolve unique functionalities.
It's not the same thing because computers the way we conceive them do not process information the same way as brains do at all.
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