Congratulations on another great piece. A few comments.
"Thinking and understanding are things physical systems do." This, in the premises, seems to potentially confuse readers to think you're arguing that all physical systems think and understand, perhaps even some kind of physicalist panpsychism. I don't think this is your intent?
"...literally any physical system is just a Chinese Room" as the logical conclusion of the CR argument against AI thinking: would this not resolve by admitting this conclusion, including for the human mind, naturally sans free will? I await your CR deep dive.
"the mind is always compared to the latest technology..." Tangentially, so have humanity's explanations of their gods: a potter, a weaver, a watchmaker, an engineer; recently, a simulation.
Considered splitting this up into smaller posts but I can either lose people in a single long post or a 10 part post on all the relevant philosophy so I went with the first
Congratulations on another great piece. A few comments.
"Thinking and understanding are things physical systems do." This, in the premises, seems to potentially confuse readers to think you're arguing that all physical systems think and understand, perhaps even some kind of physicalist panpsychism. I don't think this is your intent?
"...literally any physical system is just a Chinese Room" as the logical conclusion of the CR argument against AI thinking: would this not resolve by admitting this conclusion, including for the human mind, naturally sans free will? I await your CR deep dive.
"the mind is always compared to the latest technology..." Tangentially, so have humanity's explanations of their gods: a potter, a weaver, a watchmaker, an engineer; recently, a simulation.
Thank you! Added details on the first 2 points to make them clearer
For anyone curious about the 2018 epilepsy-patient study, Opus thinks it's Hampson et al (2018) (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/aaaed7/pdf). See also Roeder et al (2024) (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncom.2024.1263311/full), which is a follow-up from the same group.
~17k words. Dude, you *really* need to work on your synthesis skills.
Considered splitting this up into smaller posts but I can either lose people in a single long post or a 10 part post on all the relevant philosophy so I went with the first
"Considered splitting this up into smaller posts" cool, you didn't get my point at all 👍
Well I separately couldn't find stuff to cut or condense, alas