>You may be able to imagine a body physically identical to yourself not having a consciousness, but you cannot deduce from that, that this is something that can actually happen in our Universe.
Agreed, but doesn't that just further throw us back to the mystery of consciousness as something that transcends the physical? Why would a given arrangement of physical stuff necessarily give rise to subjective experience?
>It may just as well be true that any exact physical copy of a body containing a consciousness is also conscious. In fact, the latter seems like a simpler assumption than the former.
Maybe, but that assumption brings us no closer to understanding consciousness, since consciousness is so radically qualitatively different from physical stuff.
What does "a convenient way to organize a complex pattern of elementary particles for self preservation" have to do with subjective experience, qualia, etc.?
> but doesn't that just further throw us back to the mystery of consciousness as something that transcends the physical?
No, I think it does the opposite - it dissolves the concept of consciousness. "Conscious" or "unconscious" is a label we put on complex physical objects to separate them into categories by their behavior, in the same way we use "hot" and "cold" to separate things by the degree of their apparent temperature. So an atom-perfect copy of your brain would be just as conscious as you, and a program running on a hardware, both of equivalent complexity to you, would be just as conscious as you.
Agreed, but doesn't that just further throw us back to the mystery of consciousness as something that transcends the physical? Why would a given arrangement of physical stuff necessarily give rise to subjective experience?
>It may just as well be true that any exact physical copy of a body containing a consciousness is also conscious. In fact, the latter seems like a simpler assumption than the former.
Maybe, but that assumption brings us no closer to understanding consciousness, since consciousness is so radically qualitatively different from physical stuff.
What does "a convenient way to organize a complex pattern of elementary particles for self preservation" have to do with subjective experience, qualia, etc.?