> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?

Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?

> Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.

The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?

> Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.

This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!

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GoblinSlayer 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.

It's special pleading. What empirical knowledge you could acquire that would let you understand a tesseract? There are many things that are difficult to understand.

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thepasch an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> If all information processing leads to consciousness

Did you actually read what you just responded to?

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zetalyrae an hour ago | parent [-]

Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

As I wrote elsethread: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

	▲	robwwilliams 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.
	▲	thepasch an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Why some kinds of information processing and not others? I have no idea. If that's what the hard problem of consciousness boils down to - we don't know why some complex math produces consciousness and other complex math doesn't - then it boils down to "we haven't found the means to sufficiently analyze the math that does produce it." Which would turn it into... a math problem? My suspicion is that it has something to do with evolutionary pressure. Consciousness is something that evolves when systems that include their own existence within their data model become much more likely to continue existing versus those that don't. Statistics does the rest.