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Lego robot controlled by artificial worm brain developed by OpenWorm project
(www.ibtimes.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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As an academic with a great deal of experience in this field, I can quite confidently say that it's not a debated topic at all. At least, not among academics. We're (somewhat predictably) called to debate it with representatives of the various religions and spiritual creeds on an almost continuous basis, though.
And it really isn't academically debated - topics surrounding it, like the nature of the conditions leading to the formation of networks which form a 'mind' admittedly are debated, but the fundemental truth that a 'mind' is a holographic pattern arising from said network is quite a settled topic, and has been for thirty-some years now.
Ok, so what is the exact process that creates consciousness? Cus that's what I'm saying is debated but you apparently have that answer. So what EXACTLY, down to the atomic level, is consciousness? What processes and how do they emerge into consciousness?
I'll be waiting for your exact, undebated answer.
i thought they explained it quite nicely as a system arising from other systems...
Can't, but I suspect not for the reason you're hoping. The consensus, at least among computational neurologists (the field that, among other things, studies how brains work mathematically), is that "consciousness" as a concrete thing isn't really... real. It's just a term humans created to loosely describe a phenomenon that arises from any sufficiently complex well-ordered network. If you want to know what it really looks like, you can run your own OpenWorm robot! The human 'mind' looks just like that, only around a dozen orders of magnitude more complex.
The problem is that you're asking mostly meaningless questions. Even the loose definitions of consciousness aren't definable to the 'atomic level' - a mind is a mathematical construct. It's like asking where the files on your computer live; I can point to the sectors of the harddrive where a program is encoded, or even hand you a really really massive stack of punched tape, but neither of those actually are the computer program. What we call the program is the interaction of a grammar consisting of logical rules and constants running within the linguistic and computational context of an automata. It's the same as with a mind - it's the abstract state of an unfathomably complex machine.