AB,
No amount of physical complexity can define self awareness - you just go round in circles of data movements with no definitive perceptor of data.
And you make this remarkable, unknowable and entirely evidence-free assertion why exactly? What we know about emergent properties is that they’re pretty much everywhere you look, and that that there’s no logical reason to think that sufficient complexity couldn’t cause self-awareness. So far as I can tell though your only point of reference is that laptops aren’t self-aware, therefore you cannot imagine how brains could be.
It’s desperate stuff Alan, just desperate.
My soul can be defined by what it does,
You meant to say there “by what it would do if ever I could demonstrate such a thing”, and defining something “by what it does” works equally well for consciousness.
…which is to perceive and wilfully interact with this physically deterministic world.
So you assert Alan, so you assert.
And there can be no naturalistic explanation for this - partial or otherwise.
See whether you can work out where you went wrong again here. You dismiss the naturalistic model of consciousness on the ground that it “isn’t fully defined”. This is a particularly bad argument even for you – you don’t dismiss naturalistic explanations for gravity or for germs causing disease for example even though they aren’t “fully defined” either. We rely on functionally useful but incomplete models of the world pretty much all the time.
No matter. Let’s just pretend for now that “incompletely defined” is a good reason for dismissing an explanation. What then of this “soul” of yours – surely it should be subject to the same test should it not?
“Ah” you say, but there “can be no naturalistic explanation” so it’s off the hook.
Doesn’t work though does it. If you don’t like the idea of a naturalistic explanation, then come up with a
different one to distinguish the claim from white noise. Something. Anything at all even.
See, here’s the thing. If you want to attempt the special pleading of “consciousness would have to be fully explained whereas "soul" doesn’t have to be explained at all” then anyone else can play that game too. To take the above examples, I now have a free hand to assert our model of gravity to be wrong and that it's actually caused by pixies with very small strings, and for disease to be caused by wicked spirits. After all, just as you do I can “define” these agencies by what the do (hold stuff down and cause disease respectively) and, naturally, being supernatural there can be no naturalistic explanations for them of any kind. Zip. Nothing. Nada. The square root of zilch.
So, using your own “arguments”, can you think of any reason to dismiss my pixies and wicked spirits conjectures that would not also apply to your conjecture “soul”?
Anything?
