Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[Ferrocyanide]

There is a small problem there and it has nothing to do with logic. It has more to do with what exists and what doesn’t exist.

I explained it to people in another thread. I will do it here since I love explaining this:
1. Let’s say I have a CD of Win XP. The CD is made of polycarbonate plastic with its aluminium layer, with its pits.
Is the CD Win XP? Or is the CD polycarbonate plastic with its aluminium layer.
What if I melt down the CD. Where did Win XP go?
Does Win XP still exist or did I destroy it? Did it obey the law of conservation of information?

All the atoms are still there. Law of conservation of matter.

In other words, software is not a physical thing.

When you load the contents of that CD into a computer, physical processes occur whereby eventually the OS UI for XP is then displayed on the screen. Now what part exactly is Windows XP does not ultimately matter. However you define Windows XP, whether in an abstract sense or by equating it to the UI on the screen or even the contents of the CD, there is no "hard problem" here.

That’s correct. In order to run Win XP, you need physical processes (atoms). If you melt the PC that is running Win XP, where did Win XP go?
Win XP itself is not something physical. Programs and data are just information and information is not something made of atoms.
In other words, Win XP never existed in the first place. The only thing that existed was a representation of Win XP (the PC running Win XP).

This is related to the discussion about a human and an exact duplicate that doesn’t have a consciousness which you guys are calling a zombie.

I’ll come back to the hard problem later.

Simplistically speaking, the story exactly as depicted in the book went along with the book. But that's because we are applying the label "story" to the contents of that book (the collection of words and expressions that help us to understand the settings, the plot, and such). And once again, there is no "hard problem" here.

Letters, words, stories and pictures do not exist. They are non-physical things. They are just information.
When you melt the book, it is said the information is destroyed. What is actually meant is that the order of the information has changed and we don’t know how to put it back into its original state.
Some call it “non-conservation of information”.

Again, this is a case of atoms representing a non-physical things. The representation can be scrambled.

Depends on what the exact relationship between brain and consciousness is. I would say that it most probably fades away with the brain.

But not sure now what the exact point you were trying to make here?

Seems like you were trying to make the case that consciousness is like Windows XP and story in the previous two illustrations? But I don't agree that those two analogies hold, for reasons I already stated earlier.

That’s interesting. You say that conscious most probably fades away with the brain. In other words, there is a strong association between brain and consciousness.

There are some people who think that the brain has nothing to do with the soul. Some people seem to call this consciousness.
They claim that the soul is some other structure, it is non-physical, it is indestructible, and that if you die, your soul keeps on existing.

Since you and polymath257 were talking about a human and an exact copy that is a zombie, I was wondering whether you believed that the consciousness was some object that needs to be added to the human body.
That would be the only difference between the human and the zombie right? That someone plugged in a consciousness into human body 1 and he did not plug in a consciousness in human body 2.

What do you mean by "experience the flavor" (at level 1)? I just want to be clear we're not conflating first-person perspective kind of experience with experience in the third-person sense. Am I, at level 1, experiencing the flavor in a first-person perspective?

As to your question, I would say gradual, but so long as we're clear that we're not conflating different senses of consciousness.

To make it simple, let’s say I am talking about first person perspective.
(A 3 rd person perspective doesn’t matter. Let’s say he invents a machine and plugs into the brain and the meters show some values. His machine could calculate and give some metric as to what grade of consciousness an ant brain has.)

Well, it doesn't seem like consciousness is required for addition.

Beautiful.

I would say that with the exception of 4 (though I'm not too sure and need to think about this better), none of these items require consciousness. But it depends on what you mean by such things as "feeling love" and "appreciating". After all, a chat bot can easily be programmed to feel, or at least act like they're feeling. But it's a very superficial sense of the word that is qualitatively different from the phenomenal sense. Expressing words of love is different from the "I can feel my heart beating really fast" kind of love.

No no. I am talking about true feelings. I am not talking about software that mimics human responses (you type a sentence, the AI analyzes your text and follows language rules and outputs “I love you”).

But it sounds like you didn’t attribute any jobs to the consciousness.
I wanted to know if you thought of consciousness as something that exists without a body, without any atoms.
I wanted to know if you thought of it as some structure that does certain tasks. Kind of like a secondary bain.


THE HARD PROBLEM
As for why does the human brain experience consciousness? Is consciousness just a bunch of neural circuits?

I think lacking the ability to imagine that circuits can have consciousness is part of the limitation of being human.

You are able to understand Win XP because you understand certain 3D structures. You are able to understand that pits and planes on a CD surface represents Win XP.
This is a matter of visualizing objects and there positions. You understand what a pit is. You understand about locations in 3D space.
Combining those 2 concepts, you understand what a CD represents.

As for the Mickey Mouse book, it is ink on paper. Again, it is a case of objects (letters) and their positions in 3D space.
Also, the book is something immobile.

A PC running Win XP is mobile in the sense that there is electrical activity in it. However, for a human, it is easy to imagine that some RAM cells are charged and some are not charged.

I think that humans understand everything via visualization: via objects and their positions.
For example:
Imagine a water droplet in a 0-g environment.

Now, imagine the number 468.
What you are seeing on your computer screen is a graphical representation of 468.