I believe it is something simple we do not yet have the capacity to measure and that which can not be recreated as an AI.
Why do I believe it exists? Because I experience it constantly.
I am going to tell you something based on a true story about a spring in Rome believed to cure disease. For centuries even after the fall of the Empire fell people flocked to it believing the Gods blessed it with healing properties.
The scientific minded said bad to the whole thing and assumed it nothing but a legend that fools took stock in. However people continued to come and be healed, no one could explain it.
Until the invention of the Geiger Counter and the discovery of radiation.
The legend had been true all along. The spring had been mildly radioactive! It was killing off what was killing the patrons!
No one had anyway of knowing until suddenly they did.
I believe conciousness to be a similar story that we haven’t seen the end of. Perhaps free will is one as well.
The thing is your story seems more to confirm the scientific consensus around consciousness as connected to the physical existence of the brain. You describe how ancient medicine functioned through trial and error. Some times they came up with stuff that worked, more often than not they didn’t, and they had no way of knowing why a cure worked until scientific progress had discovered the underlying explanations for it. So when they found a cure that just happened to work on a certain disease, they would apply it for all sorts of diseases, or lacking proper diagnosis, would mistake other diseases for the disease it worked on and so forth.
It was blind chance without any actual useful theory behind it. Now we have useful theory which explains why consciousness would be linked to the physical cognitive functions of a brain, and less and less that would explain how it could exist without it.
I believe it is something simple we do not yet have the capacity to measure and that which can not be recreated as an AI.
Why do I believe it exists? Because I experience it constantly.
I am going to tell you something based on a true story about a spring in Rome believed to cure disease. For centuries even after the fall of the Empire fell people flocked to it believing the Gods blessed it with healing properties.
The scientific minded said bad to the whole thing and assumed it nothing but a legend that fools took stock in. However people continued to come and be healed, no one could explain it.
Until the invention of the Geiger Counter and the discovery of radiation.
The legend had been true all along. The spring had been mildly radioactive! It was killing off what was killing the patrons!
No one had anyway of knowing until suddenly they did.
I believe conciousness to be a similar story that we haven’t seen the end of. Perhaps free will is one as well.
The thing is your story seems more to confirm the scientific consensus around consciousness as connected to the physical existence of the brain. You describe how ancient medicine functioned through trial and error. Some times they came up with stuff that worked, more often than not they didn’t, and they had no way of knowing why a cure worked until scientific progress had discovered the underlying explanations for it. So when they found a cure that just happened to work on a certain disease, they would apply it for all sorts of diseases, or lacking proper diagnosis, would mistake other diseases for the disease it worked on and so forth.
It was blind chance without any actual useful theory behind it. Now we have useful theory which explains why consciousness would be linked to the physical cognitive functions of a brain, and less and less that would explain how it could exist without it.