My thoughts on - Brian Josephson - Must the Universe Contain Consciousness? on the CTT channel on YouTube

First of all, huh? WTF?

Biology is bio-chemistry which is molecular biology which is chemistry which is physics. Of course certain behaviors occurs at large scales of complexity.

References

- Assembly Theory by Sara Walker, Lee Cronin

- Poetic Naturalism by Sean Carroll

My thoughts

Like Temperature and Pressure make sense for large molecules of gas, or wetness for large number of water molecules, sure. And it is true that it is efficient to talk about principles of certain higher level, with concepts at that higher level as long as it works, but we can downshift to lower levels of principles for lower level concepts albeit loosing come efficiency but gaining precision. For example, we can talk about temperature as a field or we can talk about average kinetic energy of molecules of air or gas. But imagine if your weatherperson told you to do the average yourself and keep sending you velocities of molecules at the sensor. That would be absurd obviously, but it does not mean that in principle that is possible.

Even though many will deny, but IMO, we are (relatively) close to replicating Human consciousness in computers - which are based on silicon - a non-organic i.e. non-biological substrate, thus debunking the notion that biology is needed for consciousness. Of course I am not saying we are as close to doing this as Elon or Ray say, but I think this is going to happen. And then what will Brian say? Ned Block has talked about this on CTT.

To me consciousness is a abstract idea that can be instantiated in different, sufficiently complexity capable substrates. Back to Assembly Theory by Sara Walker, Lee Cronin.

The reason why the consciousness occurred in organic chemistry based biology, is because it was the organic chemistry was the ambient, chaotic environment on Earth. And remember it took 3+ billion years to get to the Human level of consciousness because it was happening in the chaotic environment in which the very very very slow ratcheting process of evolution was going on. Once the evolution reached the human consciousness level, where by it can have explicit intent and the ability to engineer stuff, the implementation of consciousness can happen in a different substrate, like Silicon, and in a blink of an eye type time-frame compared to the evolutionary time-frames. Why? Because now it is a guided, intentional process. That is all.

In a nutshell, I don't get what Brian saying.

What do you think?