Blaise Agüera y Arcas: belief

Transcript context

…The alternative position would be essentialism. So folks like Anil Seth and John Searle, they they think that certain types of material have a certain type of causal graph. And, you know, so for example, brains might give rise to consciousness and if we simulated a brain, it it wouldn't have the same causal graph, therefore it'd be different. But I would like to I mean, let we'll just park that, you know, just just for the moment. It seems a little bit like you're you're talking about this like a computer software architecture diagram. And we can, you know, it's like that ship of Theseus type thing where we can kind of, you know, swap things out and is it still the same thing. But I think path dependence is very important. So the kidney evolved. It it has this kind of this this rich phylogeny of of evolution. And when you replace it with something, you know, which came from a different substrate, which has a different provenance, then it it's it's almost like it it is a kidney now and it works now, but it breaks the ecology. Like imagine in an ecology, if I swapped a plant out with an artificial plant and I kept doing that, it might work now, but doesn't that affect its future trajectory? Yes. It does. But that's exactly what symbiogenesis is all about. You know, often often you will have a repurposing of something that was that was designed, if you like, you know, by nature, right? 1 of the cool things about the BFF experiment is that it shows you how, you like, intelligent design can happen without any intelligent designer. But something that was designed for 1 purpose or to serve 1 function can come back around and serve another function, and yeah, that brings a whole different contingent history with it. Right? The the that that RSV example that I gave, you know, the the ability to fuse cell membranes together came from a, you know, a virus whose original purpose had nothing to do with building placentas, but, you know, it gets incorporated and repurposed, you know, and this is the kind of bricolage that that life is made out of. So so yeah, I think I think that that kind of, you know, not only replacement, but, you know, parallel pathing, etcetera, you know, it it it doesn't just happen when we make artificial kidneys, it's you know, all the time in nature and is the very hallmark of life. So, yes, I disagree strongly with with Anil Seth and with John Searle on on this point. You know, the the brain of Theseus kind of experiments that you've alluded to, right, the idea that if you took a an emulator or a simulator of a neuron and you plugged it into your brain, you know, so that it's it's inputs and outputs are connected to the other neurons, you know, well, you know, then the other neurons wouldn't know the difference. Well, what if you do that for half of your neurons, for all of them, you know, will your consciousness get dialed down even if you behave the same way? Of course not. You know, for me, your consciousness is is obviously a function of of the functions, of the relationships of all of those things with each other. It doesn't mean that it's so simple as a computer program where you can just, you know, substitute a subroutine for another 1. I mean, you know, we've we've made computers very kind of abstract in that way, you know, and biology is wet and messy. The interfaces are are complex and hard. But but this side, this same idea of multiple realizability and repurposability is is the very stuff of life. What is your position on consciousness? So what is it? What's its purpose? Is it epiphenomenal? Can it be measured? Etcetera, etcetera.…

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