On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

Your answers aren't ignored they're refuted. And the question is asked again. Your conflating the idea of storing experience and the action of storing experience; the idea of a storage device and the existence of a storage device. There is a difference between ideas, actions, and existence. So where are your storage devices?

I'm not conflating anything. You asked where experiences are stored, and I said that they seem to be stored in the brain. I'm not sure what your problem is with this.

And by what mechanisms do neurons create the mind? What exactly is it about a particular physical system that allows actual experience to exist, rather than just a biological computer processing input and producing a behavioral output?

If an ANN would be able to pass the Turning Test than there is no question (or set of questions) you can ask it that doesn't sound like a human. Since humans have consciousness, then you cannot distinquish it from having consciousness. If you cannot distinquish the two, then they are equivalent. Hense, the ANN has developed consciousness.

That's a non sequitur. Maybe it has and maybe it hasn't. I'd have to be an ANN to know. And the reason I have to be an ANN to know is that experience is not physical, and cannot therefore be observed by anyone but the experiencer.

First off, thats a nice narrative, but where is your explanation?

My explanation for why there is mind in a universe which is mind? I don't know-- what's your explanation for why physical things exist in a physical universe?

Also, your missing the point. Why should humans be composed similarly? Why should humans have access to the same experiences?

I don't know why things are as they are. I know what you know-- that people have experiences, and that some of them are shared. Nor do I know why gravity exists, or quantum particles, or the four fundamental forces in the universe. I don't know why atoms are organized with electrons in orbit, or how they interact to cause chemical reactions.

I do, however, that all our knowledge about these things is expressible only in terms of ideas, and that our only way to get new information about these things is by experiencing them in some way.