If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)

[The Grand Nudger]

That's true, you can't. The difference is that mind is unlike all the other things we categorize.

Spincters are different too, that's why they have their own word, to denote that we are talking about a specific thing, different from other things. - Identity.

It is the one absolutely intangible thing that even hardcore physicalists must accept and incorporate. Sphincters are a child of other physical processes: tension in protein chains, fluidity of water, etc. Mind is not really a child of anything-- it's a lone, brute fact, and does therefore deserve special categorization and consideration.

It's not, whats all that biochemistry about then? Ever encountered a floating "mind"? Ever really dove into the architecture of the brain? I find it fascinating that ultimately, what we are looking at with regards to dendrites and axons (under our current model) are chemical and electrical NAND gates, which we understand to be incredibly powerful from our experience in comp sci. Universal gates, you can build any function out of them-it's just an issue of how many you've got (and we have alot). Now, of course...maybe it's just coincidence that they're set up that way, maybe they don't do anything of the sort - but they do one hell of an impersonation of machine logic- and what we can measure about them forms a fairly simple machine language. It would almost be a waste if they weren't NAND gates. Of course, a more efficient machine could be built with specifically chosen gates- but biology (and especially evolutionary biology) doesn't have a selection of gates to choose from - so we would expect to find redundant "brute force" architecture in any "evolved circuits". The one thing you'd need, with a generalized series of NAND gates that aren't predefined and redundant to the point of being built individually for every single task - would be a set of program NAND, that "chose" which serious of gates to use based upon the task at hand(it takes a different number/arrangement of NAND to emulate other gates). In this context it's easy to see one of the many possible functions of "self awareness" or "mind" and also that it isn't necessarily "other" . This is the reason that we're searching for ai, the ability to monitor ones own system, however flawed or inefficient, yields computational returns - and it doesn't have to be anything more that sufficiently arranged NANDs itself, as we've built self referential machine systems out of NAND already, too many to count.

The system is robust through brute force (due to massively redundant NAND), but with just a little bit of "user" interaction it's processing power grows exponentially. Again, it may just be that our brains are only engaging in a clever(?) impersonation of an inefficiently built-but powerful, evolved computational architecture...........but that seems awfully elaborate - for a dumb machine. Now, this is why I wonder whether you've done any "wondering" about this beyond your own "mind". See how non-mysterious this is? People are actually parsing the architecture of the brain at a basic level - that of possible individual logic gates. Experiments are done, observations are taken. The subject "self reports"-which is shaky, because we don't really know whats going on in our own minds anymore than we know what's going on in our pc's (by and large - or anymore than our pc's "know" whats actually on the screen) - but it has some value. Predictions are made, confirmed and disproven. It's all about as mysterious as a traffic light. Perhaps that's all this really boils down to anyway? You and I have different ideas of mystery, different ideas of categorization. It's hard for me to see where the logic ends and "mind" begins. But I'm biased, obviously. I had a childhood job in pcb manufacturing - and it turned into a lifelong obsession. I suppose some might even find the existence and utility of pcb's "mysterious" or "a lone brute fact" deserving special categorization and consideration. Any question you ask along the lines of "why should the brain be able to produce qualia" also applies to PCBs (even if, ultimately, we're totally wrong about the architecture and the brain actually is doing an impersonation of logic gates without actually using them as logic gates-for whatever arcane reason...nobody ever said biology was smart, eh?) . Why should they have the ability to perform logical functions? The answer to that is simple - anything can be used to perform a logical function- the only requirement is that the function is adequetely mapped. It doesn't matter whether you use water, stones, or little woolen blocks covered with a mysterious substance known as "redstone" in a children's fantasy game (virtual logic machines built inside of a program that resides in a machine, wewt). Machine logic is just a way of manipulating the observed behavior of "things" to perform a specific task. That process "creates" things unlike those that go into their construction in your conception, but entirely like them in mine - as the outputs of a system do not have to be similar to the inputs, materially. You can use a water based (permeability, salinity, etc) gate to produce an electric or kinetic signal through displacement or conductivity. That the output appears to differ from the input is inconsequential- it's "logic" that the system is doing, not "water" or "stones" or "little woolen blocks"- the inputs and the outputs are equally logical objects, parts to an overall function. Mind is no less tangible than gravity, when it is viewed as the behavior of a specific class (or sub-class) of otherwise explicable things. Explaining the behavior of those tangibles -is- the explanation of the "intangible".

Simply put, this explains qualia as a service that the machine provides, self referential, and as a modifier for computational power (without such a system machines can't compare apples to oranges, or offer multiple outputs and meta-analysis of those outputs). Perhaps tellingly - this is the sort of behavior we would expect from a machine with this magnitude of processing power....and it's precisely the sort of behavior we see in human beings-both biologically and "intangibly". Again (because I can't stress this enough) it may all be a hellish coincidence - but I, personally, see little reason to weigh down our explanations with that assumption.