Models of the emergence of consciousness from a material substrate (whether weak or strong emergence—it won’t matter for this post) differ on how easy it is for consciousness to emerge. Functionalist or computationalist models make it relatively easy: as long as there is a functional isomorphism between a thing and a conscious thing, the former is conscious as well. Biological models, on the other hand, make it harder, by putting constraints on what kind of biological realization of a functional structure gives rise to consciousness.
It’s interesting to note that there the more permissive a model of consciousness is, the easier it is to tune the universe to get consciousness, and hence the better the response that can be given to fine-tuning arguments for theism or a multiverse. On the other hand, the more permissive a model, the greater the danger of skepticism from the fact that the buzzing atoms in a random rock have some sort of isomorphism to a human brain, and hence it is not clear that we have good reason to think we’re not rocks.
On the other hand, the more restrictive a model of consciousness is, the harder it is to tune the universe to get consciousness. On one extreme, you need brains to be conscious. But brains are a specific type of physical organ in DNA-based life forms, so you need life-forms rather like us to have consciousness, and the fine-tuning needed becomes more stringent. On the other hand, the more human-like conscious things have to be the less skepticism we have to worry about.
Is there some kind of a Goldilocks zone in the range of theories of consciousness where the fine-tuning is not too onerous and skepticism is not an issue? I don’t know.
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