I think your first option doesn’t necessarily have to distinguish between humans and non humans as a binary. Maybe at some level of complexity, neurons alone are not enough and the physical substrate comes into play. Penrose wrote a book where he makes the case that human intelligence cannot be purely computational and where he identifies the quantum nature of the brains’s microtubules as a possible mechanism.
Consciousness is itself is on a whole other level than just intelligence. I personally feel there has to be something metaphysical about it. Otherwise I think the only alternatives are super determinism and consciousness doesn’t actually exist, or numbers have consciousness.
My thoughts on this are a bit sloppy still, but here’s my view. I can’t rhyme the first alternative with ‘cogito ergo sum’ as to me it seems my thoughts have to exist somewhere. On the second alternative, this would imply nothing could actually exist but somehow there’s a principle that every possible decoding of an integer that represents something actually turns that something into existence. Where does that principle then come from and does that decoding not need something to run on?
I think your first option doesn’t necessarily have to distinguish between humans and non humans as a binary. Maybe at some level of complexity, neurons alone are not enough and the physical substrate comes into play. Penrose wrote a book where he makes the case that human intelligence cannot be purely computational and where he identifies the quantum nature of the brains’s microtubules as a possible mechanism.
Consciousness is itself is on a whole other level than just intelligence. I personally feel there has to be something metaphysical about it. Otherwise I think the only alternatives are super determinism and consciousness doesn’t actually exist, or numbers have consciousness.
My thoughts on this are a bit sloppy still, but here’s my view. I can’t rhyme the first alternative with ‘cogito ergo sum’ as to me it seems my thoughts have to exist somewhere. On the second alternative, this would imply nothing could actually exist but somehow there’s a principle that every possible decoding of an integer that represents something actually turns that something into existence. Where does that principle then come from and does that decoding not need something to run on?