>In other words, unless we are content to “bite the bullet” of panpsychism, then no machine, however complex, can ever realize phenomenal consciousness purely in virtue of the execution of a particular computer program.
Ok, but why are biological neurons exempted from this argument? I mean, aside from the obvious conflict of interest that the person who wrote this article is made out of them, and they would much rather not be ontologically dissolved into a soulless zombie.
I'm not sure you actually have to bite the panpsychism bullet either (or I'm misunderstanding what that word means). Adding a Putnam mapping to an FSA or giving you a book that maps Chinese characters to other Chinese characters doesn't necessarily make the FSA conscious or you a literate Chinese reader. It just makes the sum total of those things conscious. Likewise, each individual neuron in your head does not need to be totally conscious. Consciousness is an emergent property of your whole body, not just something attributable to parts of it.
Ok, but why are biological neurons exempted from this argument? I mean, aside from the obvious conflict of interest that the person who wrote this article is made out of them, and they would much rather not be ontologically dissolved into a soulless zombie.
I'm not sure you actually have to bite the panpsychism bullet either (or I'm misunderstanding what that word means). Adding a Putnam mapping to an FSA or giving you a book that maps Chinese characters to other Chinese characters doesn't necessarily make the FSA conscious or you a literate Chinese reader. It just makes the sum total of those things conscious. Likewise, each individual neuron in your head does not need to be totally conscious. Consciousness is an emergent property of your whole body, not just something attributable to parts of it.