Dude, it's a 2/3 majority, not a 3/4 majority. And far from "not listening to the People", the initiatives system makes California one of the most responsive to the will of the People. Which is exactly why they're in so much trouble.
People: We demand that $2B from the general fund be set aside for the education of small puppies.
Government: OK. That means that uncommitted revenue drops by $2B. We'll have to cut teacher's salaries by 14%.
People: Idiots! Why do you hate children? We demand that teacher's salaries be increased 5%, not cut.
Government: Okay, but we'll have to cut housing assistance.
People: Why do you hate the poor? You may not cut housing assistance.
Government: We'll raise taxes, then.
People: We demand that all tax increases be approved by 2/3 of the state senate.
Government: You do know that means taxes will never go up again, and that you're allowing a tiny, intransigent minority to run the state off a cliff, right?
People: Why don't you respect the will of the People?
Prop. 13 has butchered California. Prop. 13 was a conservative brainchild. Congratulations, bozo. You and yours just wrecked 1/5th of the the economy. But I suppose you think your state will be so much better once the schools shut down and Prudential is buying ad space on El Capitan.
I think your overall point is valid, but there are differences between the United States and the other nations you listed. I think the other big difference is that the American diet is a uniquely poor one. Given that most of our health care dollars go to diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, which can be greatly reduced with better diet, our eating habits are a central issue in the health care debate.
I've thought about trying to increase my google rank. But when you google your name and the first hit that comes up is some poor parent's internet shrine to a dead baby, your motivation for the project goes flush down the toilet.
I'm going to legally change my name to "Bernard Frankenmule." Zero competition on Google for that one.
You're not wrong. But I do wish that everyone out there had somebody who found their thoughts worthwhile and valuable. I think we'd all be happier.
Don't go around wrecking peoples' delusions. I don't know what I'd do if I were revealed for the shallow, talentless hack that I am. I'd probably kick a puppy, and you wouldn't want that on your conscience.
I believe it was the lack of secret balloting that allowed all manner of vote-buying schemes, including big patronage machines like Tammany Hall.
Public ballots make it harder for people to vote their conscience, and easier for groups with power to intimidate or bribe the people they have power over. But you're right that private ballots give too much leeway to the people we charge with counting the ballots. I don't see a perfect solution. I think that voting machines with open software and a voter-verified paper trail are as close to the ideal as we can get.
Unlike with owning cats, cultivating tomatoes without a license, and loaning books to friends, the harm to others is not purely a side effect of such actions being declared illegal and people doing them illegally instead of following the law.
Most of the harm to society comes from the enforcement of the law, and not marijuana use itself. So by the same reasoning, you could outlaw owning cats, and your "logic" would hold equally for that as well. The harm comes not from the criminalization of the act, but from stubborn people who continue to keep cats in direct violation of the ban, right?
What you've basically been arguing, in every comment on this entire story, is that marijuana should remain illegal because it is currently illegal. I cannot, in all your rantings about the sanctity of the will of the majority, find one instance where you cited any actual harm that would result from decriminalization. Oh, wait. It would make the hippies happy, which you seem to consider a harm in its own right.
You also have a second schtick where you try to marginalize the pro-legalization side of the argument as a handful of stoners, which it clearly is not. Recent polls have put the pro-legalization side between 30% and 40% of the population, and 13 states have some form of decriminalization on the books (including California, which by itself has about 1/5th of the population).
I think those numbers would grow if we had a real, substantiative debate about the benefits and harms of legalization vs. the current situation. Because whenever I run across someone so rabidly anti-legalization as you, they have trouble giving good reasons for their position. In your case, you've basically taken "it must be illegal for a reason" and strung it out to the length of dozens of comments.
Actually, only a handful of crops receive significant subsidies. Corn, wheat, cotton, rice, and soy get 6.8B of a total 8B a year. src
If we can't eliminate subsidies altogether, we should at least move some of that money over to fresh fruits and vegetables. It's especially confusing that we subsidize tobacco production even as we tax the hell out of the product that results.
I hope that, on January 20th, 2016, Obama's farewell address goes something like this: "My fellow Americans, now that I've balanced the budget, brought an end to global warming, covered every American under a universal health insurance plan, restored America's position both as a technological frontrunner and as a respected world power, and personally invented a car that get sixty miles to a shovelful of dirt, I stand here before you to say, hell yes, I was born in Kenya!"
"Good luck in your presidency, Mrs. Clinton. I'm out, bitches!"
The radical political transformations you cite were extremely negative ones. The story author was saying that we have little faith in positive political transformations. Your counterexamples seem to support his argument.
Oh, and the whole thing with the world going through a cooling period now probably has something to do with it.
Great Cthulhu's corpse, do we have to go through this again?
Let's go over the chart. 1998 (the big uppy spiky thing near the end of the graph) was a huge warm year, because of El Nino, not because of global warming per se. 2008 (the downy liney thing at the end of the graph) was an exceptionally cool year, because of La Nina, and not because of any long-term cooling trend.
Get rid of those two points, and the whole "we're going through a global cooling period" argument melts away like so much glacier.
Excluding 1998, every year of the new millennium has been warmer than every single year that has come before it, back thousands of years.
From June 2007 on, data indicated a weak La Niña event, strengthening in early 2008 and weakening in late 2008, with a forecast return to neutral conditions in 2009.
The El Niño of 1997-1998 was particularly strong and brought the phenomenon to worldwide attention. The event temporarily warmed air temperature by 1.5C, compared to the usual increase of 0.25C associated with El Niño events.
And just because it was brought it up, got to mention something. I am really getting tired of this "finding a middle ground" / "moderate" position. Moderation is a tool of negotiation, not a principle unto itself.
The principles on display:
* The opinions of others have merit. * No one person has all the wisdom, so the best answers are usually found by bringing together a wide variety of views. * The ability to engage with opposing viewpoints is not just critical to a peaceful, civilized society, it is also a way of treating your fellow human beings as human beings, not as obstacles to steamroll over.
Those principles are highly desirable. I don't think that the "add the positions and divide by two" approach is the best way to achieve them, though.
In fact, it can achieve the opposite. Rather than listening to one another, two different sides can simply stake out more extreme positions, in the hope of screwing up the average.
I guess you have evidence that the process is classical and you do not use Occam's Razor on that.
No need. Occam's razor basically says that you take the simplest explanation until that explanation stops working. In this case, standard biochemistry is the simpler explanation.
Imagine that a modern day CPU were sent back to the 1930s for reverse engineering. Scientist A looks at it under a powerful microscope, sees the silicon pathways, and guesses that electricity flows along them. Scientist B disputes this, saying that such complex computations couldn't be a mere electrical phenomena. He instead posits that the paths are made up of a dense tangle of hollow tubes, where quantum interactions drive the calculations.
Scientist B has the more complex theory, violating Occam's razor. Moreover, he insists on clinging to it even as the evidence pours in that the features on the chip are analogous to the vacuum tubes used in 1930's era computers.
We're in about the same situation today. We do have evidence that simulating only the large-scale features of neurons leads to firing patterns similar to those we see in real brains. In fact, that's kind of the point of the article.
I'm not obsessed with free will. I really doubt that my actions were foretold at the moment of the Big Bang, and I don't much care if they are. Being alive is still a pretty nifty sensation. The reason I brought up free will is the reason I gave: people who harp on the idea of quantum mechanical neurons are usually doing so in an attempt to rescue free will from classical determinism.
By the way, Daniel Dennett, in his book "Freedom Evolves", demolishes the idea that a QM brain is useful, using your argument (among others). It's a good read.
I'm thinking, big ship, used to house hundreds if not thousands of sailors. Why not turn it into some sort of affordable housing?
Maybe not. Ships need constant repainting to protect them from the elements, so the cost of keeping it afloat could be prohibitive.
You could also argue that it would have to clog up a harbor somewhere.
Those are the drawbacks I see. But having large quantities of housing that could be moved between coastal cities has to have some upsides. If you could keep the engines running, turn them into portable generators, that would make it all the better.
But you have to admit, Schroedinger's Cat is an extreme case. Quantum mechanical effects rarely have such clear, large-scale effects. In the case of the human body, the dark-adjusted eye has the ability to detect a single photon, but I can't think of anywhere else where quantum mechanics is really relevant.
There is no evidence that quantum mechanical effects are vital to our thought processes. In the absence of such evidence, Occam's Razor dictates that we are better off not trying to integrate them into our theory of mind. As I said, when quantum mechanical solutions get invoked in this area, it's never to explain an observed physical phenomenon. The motivation is always to avoid the implication that the mind is deterministic, to reintroduce some of the "magic" that the proponent wants the mind to have.
At this point, I don't believe that we've learned anything about the workings of the brain that demands a quantum mechanical explanation. Unless you have a counterexample, speculations on the matter seem pointless to me.
The problem is, right now we have one good model for conscious thought. That is the human model, and we will be spending probably the next twenty or thirty years trying to emulate it. Using the knowledge we gain from that, we might be able to create another form of intelligence that fears not for its own existence. But the fact that we may be able to build such a conscious artifact doesn't mean that we can ignore our duties towards a consciousness that can fear for its life.
By your reasoning, if we develop a drug that makes a person oblivious to fear and impervious to pain, murder might be all right if the drug were administered first. In fact, it's pretty easy to argue that administering the drug would be a more humane murder than the alternative. But people who kill their victims painlessly are still punished, because the suffering inflicted is not the whole of the crime.
Well, neurons are vastly bigger than the scale where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle takes effect. So theoretically it should be possible to observe the relevant workings of neurons without altering their functioning in a meaningful way. People reach for the quantum mechanical explanation not out of logical necessity, but because an explanation that is amenable to classical physics opens itself up to cries of "determinism."
There are a few problems with the QM path. First, I don't believe there's anything wrong with the classical-only explanations. The only real problem is that some philosophers find them distasteful. Second, I'm not sure that any reasonable models for QM consciousness have been proposed. That is to say, I don't think anybody has shown a plausible mechanism by which quantum interactions could filter upwards in such a way as to affect neuron firings. Lastly, would replacing a hypothetically deterministic brain with one that occasionally fired some neurons based on a random number generator be any more satisfying, from a free will perspective? I don't think it would. You would have to show not only that the QM interactions were substantially affecting the workings of the brain, but also that "you" were somehow in "control" of those interactions.
Without showing that, it seems that you would be no more responsible for your crimes, and no more the master of your destiny, than you were when your brain was entirely mechanical.
It seems so obvious to me that the experience of consciousness cannot be a result of "software", nor "hardware" -- it cannot be the result of atoms, molecules, and electrons. Isn't that obvious to anyone else?
True, quite a number of people take this for granted. They vastly outnumber those who feel otherwise.
That in no way makes it correct.
I do wonder, if you're certain that consciousness is impossible to explain in merely physical terms, then why are you hoping that the phenomenon will get more study? If you're correct, what is there to learn? Shouldn't it be beyond any tools we can use to study it?
My impression is that few people in the relevant fields have resorted to the idea that consciousness requires a quantum mechanical explanation. Most of those who have, I think, are of the mind that they're two seemingly magical tastes that taste great together. Consciousness seems mysterious, quantum mechanics seems mysterious. Of course they must be connected. I doubt they are.*
What, pray tell, is wrong with the cargo cult approach? The original cargo culters built the best simulations of steamships that their understanding of the phenomenon allowed. Perhaps, given enough time, and more observations of steamships...
When climate scientists come up with a climate model where things like the Gulf Stream emerge of their own accord from the data, nobody calls it cargo cult science. Instead, they rightly recognize that the models have improved, and are now capturing some aspects of the climate that they didn't before. In the same way, a brain model where alpha waves emerge on their own (not, as the GP suggests, programmed in) then we know we've captured something about the workings of the brain that we didn't before.
Is it conscious? Probably not. But until we can simulate a human brain, I'm not sure how we're going to make that determination.
Your example is flawed. If you asked me to give a detailed account of what you did on July 15th, 1997, I couldn't do that either. I could reflect back on exactly what time in my life that was, maybe make a guess at what I might have been doing. It would help to know what day of the week it was. But honestly, I have zero recollection. Most likely, if you gave me a detailed account to peruse, I probably would remember none of it. Yet I was probably conscious that day.
As someone pointed out, feral children have been studied. They lack language and culture, but they nevertheless have consciousness. The problem is, with these strange cases, our usual tools for understanding the contents of their mind (language and culture) are useless. Our inability to understand those contents doesn't mean their minds are empty.
Same goes for animals and pre-verbal humans. Quite a few humans never achieve language skills, but there is no way of showing that they aren't really aware of themselves or their surroundings. In fact they seem to show the opposite.
Long term memory formation is crucial to answering your question, but may not be strictly necessary for consciousness. There are examples of people who cannot form long-term memories. But if you talk to them, they are clearly conscious.
Finally, we have the rock-throwing chimp. Chimps don't have language, yet the chimp was able to carry out planning, based on a prediction of a future emotional state.
In the article, I found Gerald Eldman's answer to "How did these various levels of consciousness evolve?" particularly enlightening. To him, the ability to network your memories together to create narrations seems to be the seat of consciousness. Language seems to be something bolted on top of that ability, that allows the narrations to be transferred from one brain to another (in a highly compressed, lossy fashion that can only be properly decoded if the recipient brain shares some culture with the source brain). Now, once that ability developed, I'm sure that it had some profound effects on the rest of the brain. So you could say that language may now be crucial to human consciousness.
But that still avoids the issue I raised earlier: If we take the hardware being described (or a more detailed future analogue), and perfectly map the connections of a human brain on top of it, and set that software to running, why wouldn't consciousness emerge? All the requisite language and culture should already be encoded in the interconnections.
1956? I know that some truths are timeless and all that, but the paper you're asking "the kids" to read was published prior to the invention of MRI and CAT scans, prior to a million advances in neurophysiology and artificial intelligence, in an age when the computer was in its infancy.
That leads me to suspect that, either somebody has done work updating Sellars' work to reflect the last fifty years of scientific progress, or that those years have rendered him obsolete. Since Sellars' Wikipedia entry describes his paper as "lengthy and difficult", and I freely admit that I have the attention span of a cocaine-sniffing gnat, I need more incentive to read it.
The other reason I'm disinclined to read it is, well, you. You call your opponents "kids", thereby asserting your intellectual superiority, then make glib, simplistic comments like, "Consciousness does not just happen in the vacuum of a lab," and "just a simulation of something with consciousness." As if the difference between a thing and the simulation of the thing are so cleanly separable.
I think your points are trivial. Once we understand how to build the hardware, programming the proper software for it is easy. My parents performed the feat four times, with no specialized training.
Put the hardware in a body that squirms, demands attention, and pushes our nurturing buttons, and all that's left is a couple decades of worrying about whether it's getting its chores and homework done.
Actually, it would be faster to just decompile an existing brain, map the neurons and connections, and call that the program. We don't need to understand the encodings in order to replicate them, just like you don't need to be able to decrypt a DVD in order to burn a copy.
You sound frustrated that philosophers aren't getting the credit they deserve. I'm curious, are you a philosopher?
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Dude, it's a 2/3 majority, not a 3/4 majority. And far from "not listening to the People", the initiatives system makes California one of the most responsive to the will of the People. Which is exactly why they're in so much trouble.
People: We demand that $2B from the general fund be set aside for the education of small puppies.
Government: OK. That means that uncommitted revenue drops by $2B. We'll have to cut teacher's salaries by 14%.
People: Idiots! Why do you hate children? We demand that teacher's salaries be increased 5%, not cut.
Government: Okay, but we'll have to cut housing assistance.
People: Why do you hate the poor? You may not cut housing assistance.
Government: We'll raise taxes, then.
People: We demand that all tax increases be approved by 2/3 of the state senate.
Government: You do know that means taxes will never go up again, and that you're allowing a tiny, intransigent minority to run the state off a cliff, right?
People: Why don't you respect the will of the People?
Prop. 13 has butchered California. Prop. 13 was a conservative brainchild. Congratulations, bozo. You and yours just wrecked 1/5th of the the economy. But I suppose you think your state will be so much better once the schools shut down and Prudential is buying ad space on El Capitan.
I think your overall point is valid, but there are differences between the United States and the other nations you listed. I think the other big difference is that the American diet is a uniquely poor one. Given that most of our health care dollars go to diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, which can be greatly reduced with better diet, our eating habits are a central issue in the health care debate.
I've thought about trying to increase my google rank. But when you google your name and the first hit that comes up is some poor parent's internet shrine to a dead baby, your motivation for the project goes flush down the toilet.
I'm going to legally change my name to "Bernard Frankenmule." Zero competition on Google for that one.
You're not wrong. But I do wish that everyone out there had somebody who found their thoughts worthwhile and valuable. I think we'd all be happier.
Don't go around wrecking peoples' delusions. I don't know what I'd do if I were revealed for the shallow, talentless hack that I am. I'd probably kick a puppy, and you wouldn't want that on your conscience.
"And there was nothing lost?"
I believe it was the lack of secret balloting that allowed all manner of vote-buying schemes, including big patronage machines like Tammany Hall.
Public ballots make it harder for people to vote their conscience, and easier for groups with power to intimidate or bribe the people they have power over. But you're right that private ballots give too much leeway to the people we charge with counting the ballots. I don't see a perfect solution. I think that voting machines with open software and a voter-verified paper trail are as close to the ideal as we can get.
There is an old saying about how those who don't read history are doomed to repeat it.
I have no idea why that thought sprang to mind just now. None whatsoever.
Most of the harm to society comes from the enforcement of the law, and not marijuana use itself. So by the same reasoning, you could outlaw owning cats, and your "logic" would hold equally for that as well. The harm comes not from the criminalization of the act, but from stubborn people who continue to keep cats in direct violation of the ban, right?
What you've basically been arguing, in every comment on this entire story, is that marijuana should remain illegal because it is currently illegal. I cannot, in all your rantings about the sanctity of the will of the majority, find one instance where you cited any actual harm that would result from decriminalization. Oh, wait. It would make the hippies happy, which you seem to consider a harm in its own right.
You also have a second schtick where you try to marginalize the pro-legalization side of the argument as a handful of stoners, which it clearly is not. Recent polls have put the pro-legalization side between 30% and 40% of the population, and 13 states have some form of decriminalization on the books (including California, which by itself has about 1/5th of the population).
I think those numbers would grow if we had a real, substantiative debate about the benefits and harms of legalization vs. the current situation. Because whenever I run across someone so rabidly anti-legalization as you, they have trouble giving good reasons for their position. In your case, you've basically taken "it must be illegal for a reason" and strung it out to the length of dozens of comments.
Actually, only a handful of crops receive significant subsidies. Corn, wheat, cotton, rice, and soy get 6.8B of a total 8B a year. src
If we can't eliminate subsidies altogether, we should at least move some of that money over to fresh fruits and vegetables. It's especially confusing that we subsidize tobacco production even as we tax the hell out of the product that results.
I hope that, on January 20th, 2016, Obama's farewell address goes something like this: "My fellow Americans, now that I've balanced the budget, brought an end to global warming, covered every American under a universal health insurance plan, restored America's position both as a technological frontrunner and as a respected world power, and personally invented a car that get sixty miles to a shovelful of dirt, I stand here before you to say, hell yes, I was born in Kenya!"
"Good luck in your presidency, Mrs. Clinton. I'm out, bitches!"
The radical political transformations you cite were extremely negative ones. The story author was saying that we have little faith in positive political transformations. Your counterexamples seem to support his argument.
Great Cthulhu's corpse, do we have to go through this again?
Let's go over the chart. 1998 (the big uppy spiky thing near the end of the graph) was a huge warm year, because of El Nino, not because of global warming per se. 2008 (the downy liney thing at the end of the graph) was an exceptionally cool year, because of La Nina, and not because of any long-term cooling trend.
Get rid of those two points, and the whole "we're going through a global cooling period" argument melts away like so much glacier.
Excluding 1998, every year of the new millennium has been warmer than every single year that has come before it, back thousands of years.
From Wikipedia:
The principles on display:
* The opinions of others have merit.
* No one person has all the wisdom, so the best answers are usually found by bringing together a wide variety of views.
* The ability to engage with opposing viewpoints is not just critical to a peaceful, civilized society, it is also a way of treating your fellow human beings as human beings, not as obstacles to steamroll over.
Those principles are highly desirable. I don't think that the "add the positions and divide by two" approach is the best way to achieve them, though.
In fact, it can achieve the opposite. Rather than listening to one another, two different sides can simply stake out more extreme positions, in the hope of screwing up the average.
Off topic? Really? "What would you do with a free battle cruiser?" seemed perfectly on-topic to me.
I think the off topic mod is just a code for "I don't like this comment, but there's no -1 Disagree to be found."
No need. Occam's razor basically says that you take the simplest explanation until that explanation stops working. In this case, standard biochemistry is the simpler explanation.
Imagine that a modern day CPU were sent back to the 1930s for reverse engineering. Scientist A looks at it under a powerful microscope, sees the silicon pathways, and guesses that electricity flows along them. Scientist B disputes this, saying that such complex computations couldn't be a mere electrical phenomena. He instead posits that the paths are made up of a dense tangle of hollow tubes, where quantum interactions drive the calculations.
Scientist B has the more complex theory, violating Occam's razor. Moreover, he insists on clinging to it even as the evidence pours in that the features on the chip are analogous to the vacuum tubes used in 1930's era computers.
We're in about the same situation today. We do have evidence that simulating only the large-scale features of neurons leads to firing patterns similar to those we see in real brains. In fact, that's kind of the point of the article.
I'm not obsessed with free will. I really doubt that my actions were foretold at the moment of the Big Bang, and I don't much care if they are. Being alive is still a pretty nifty sensation. The reason I brought up free will is the reason I gave: people who harp on the idea of quantum mechanical neurons are usually doing so in an attempt to rescue free will from classical determinism.
By the way, Daniel Dennett, in his book "Freedom Evolves", demolishes the idea that a QM brain is useful, using your argument (among others). It's a good read.
I'm thinking, big ship, used to house hundreds if not thousands of sailors. Why not turn it into some sort of affordable housing?
Maybe not. Ships need constant repainting to protect them from the elements, so the cost of keeping it afloat could be prohibitive.
You could also argue that it would have to clog up a harbor somewhere.
Those are the drawbacks I see. But having large quantities of housing that could be moved between coastal cities has to have some upsides. If you could keep the engines running, turn them into portable generators, that would make it all the better.
But you have to admit, Schroedinger's Cat is an extreme case. Quantum mechanical effects rarely have such clear, large-scale effects. In the case of the human body, the dark-adjusted eye has the ability to detect a single photon, but I can't think of anywhere else where quantum mechanics is really relevant.
There is no evidence that quantum mechanical effects are vital to our thought processes. In the absence of such evidence, Occam's Razor dictates that we are better off not trying to integrate them into our theory of mind. As I said, when quantum mechanical solutions get invoked in this area, it's never to explain an observed physical phenomenon. The motivation is always to avoid the implication that the mind is deterministic, to reintroduce some of the "magic" that the proponent wants the mind to have.
At this point, I don't believe that we've learned anything about the workings of the brain that demands a quantum mechanical explanation. Unless you have a counterexample, speculations on the matter seem pointless to me.
Thank you for the response. I think I'll give it a read.
As a mostly-satisfied Rails developer, I have two questions:
1) Could you link to something that explains the stupidity of the Rails architecture?
2) So, what do you use? And are you happy with it?
The problem is, right now we have one good model for conscious thought. That is the human model, and we will be spending probably the next twenty or thirty years trying to emulate it. Using the knowledge we gain from that, we might be able to create another form of intelligence that fears not for its own existence. But the fact that we may be able to build such a conscious artifact doesn't mean that we can ignore our duties towards a consciousness that can fear for its life.
By your reasoning, if we develop a drug that makes a person oblivious to fear and impervious to pain, murder might be all right if the drug were administered first. In fact, it's pretty easy to argue that administering the drug would be a more humane murder than the alternative. But people who kill their victims painlessly are still punished, because the suffering inflicted is not the whole of the crime.
Well, neurons are vastly bigger than the scale where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle takes effect. So theoretically it should be possible to observe the relevant workings of neurons without altering their functioning in a meaningful way. People reach for the quantum mechanical explanation not out of logical necessity, but because an explanation that is amenable to classical physics opens itself up to cries of "determinism."
There are a few problems with the QM path. First, I don't believe there's anything wrong with the classical-only explanations. The only real problem is that some philosophers find them distasteful. Second, I'm not sure that any reasonable models for QM consciousness have been proposed. That is to say, I don't think anybody has shown a plausible mechanism by which quantum interactions could filter upwards in such a way as to affect neuron firings. Lastly, would replacing a hypothetically deterministic brain with one that occasionally fired some neurons based on a random number generator be any more satisfying, from a free will perspective? I don't think it would. You would have to show not only that the QM interactions were substantially affecting the workings of the brain, but also that "you" were somehow in "control" of those interactions.
Without showing that, it seems that you would be no more responsible for your crimes, and no more the master of your destiny, than you were when your brain was entirely mechanical.
True, quite a number of people take this for granted. They vastly outnumber those who feel otherwise.
That in no way makes it correct.
I do wonder, if you're certain that consciousness is impossible to explain in merely physical terms, then why are you hoping that the phenomenon will get more study? If you're correct, what is there to learn? Shouldn't it be beyond any tools we can use to study it?
My impression is that few people in the relevant fields have resorted to the idea that consciousness requires a quantum mechanical explanation. Most of those who have, I think, are of the mind that they're two seemingly magical tastes that taste great together. Consciousness seems mysterious, quantum mechanics seems mysterious. Of course they must be connected. I doubt they are.*
* Not that I'm qualified to pass judgment.
What, pray tell, is wrong with the cargo cult approach? The original cargo culters built the best simulations of steamships that their understanding of the phenomenon allowed. Perhaps, given enough time, and more observations of steamships...
When climate scientists come up with a climate model where things like the Gulf Stream emerge of their own accord from the data, nobody calls it cargo cult science. Instead, they rightly recognize that the models have improved, and are now capturing some aspects of the climate that they didn't before. In the same way, a brain model where alpha waves emerge on their own (not, as the GP suggests, programmed in) then we know we've captured something about the workings of the brain that we didn't before.
Is it conscious? Probably not. But until we can simulate a human brain, I'm not sure how we're going to make that determination.
Your example is flawed. If you asked me to give a detailed account of what you did on July 15th, 1997, I couldn't do that either. I could reflect back on exactly what time in my life that was, maybe make a guess at what I might have been doing. It would help to know what day of the week it was. But honestly, I have zero recollection. Most likely, if you gave me a detailed account to peruse, I probably would remember none of it. Yet I was probably conscious that day.
As someone pointed out, feral children have been studied. They lack language and culture, but they nevertheless have consciousness. The problem is, with these strange cases, our usual tools for understanding the contents of their mind (language and culture) are useless. Our inability to understand those contents doesn't mean their minds are empty.
Same goes for animals and pre-verbal humans. Quite a few humans never achieve language skills, but there is no way of showing that they aren't really aware of themselves or their surroundings. In fact they seem to show the opposite.
Long term memory formation is crucial to answering your question, but may not be strictly necessary for consciousness. There are examples of people who cannot form long-term memories. But if you talk to them, they are clearly conscious.
Finally, we have the rock-throwing chimp. Chimps don't have language, yet the chimp was able to carry out planning, based on a prediction of a future emotional state.
In the article, I found Gerald Eldman's answer to "How did these various levels of consciousness evolve?" particularly enlightening. To him, the ability to network your memories together to create narrations seems to be the seat of consciousness. Language seems to be something bolted on top of that ability, that allows the narrations to be transferred from one brain to another (in a highly compressed, lossy fashion that can only be properly decoded if the recipient brain shares some culture with the source brain). Now, once that ability developed, I'm sure that it had some profound effects on the rest of the brain. So you could say that language may now be crucial to human consciousness.
But that still avoids the issue I raised earlier: If we take the hardware being described (or a more detailed future analogue), and perfectly map the connections of a human brain on top of it, and set that software to running, why wouldn't consciousness emerge? All the requisite language and culture should already be encoded in the interconnections.
1956? I know that some truths are timeless and all that, but the paper you're asking "the kids" to read was published prior to the invention of MRI and CAT scans, prior to a million advances in neurophysiology and artificial intelligence, in an age when the computer was in its infancy.
That leads me to suspect that, either somebody has done work updating Sellars' work to reflect the last fifty years of scientific progress, or that those years have rendered him obsolete. Since Sellars' Wikipedia entry describes his paper as "lengthy and difficult", and I freely admit that I have the attention span of a cocaine-sniffing gnat, I need more incentive to read it.
The other reason I'm disinclined to read it is, well, you. You call your opponents "kids", thereby asserting your intellectual superiority, then make glib, simplistic comments like, "Consciousness does not just happen in the vacuum of a lab," and "just a simulation of something with consciousness." As if the difference between a thing and the simulation of the thing are so cleanly separable.
I think your points are trivial. Once we understand how to build the hardware, programming the proper software for it is easy. My parents performed the feat four times, with no specialized training.
Put the hardware in a body that squirms, demands attention, and pushes our nurturing buttons, and all that's left is a couple decades of worrying about whether it's getting its chores and homework done.
Actually, it would be faster to just decompile an existing brain, map the neurons and connections, and call that the program. We don't need to understand the encodings in order to replicate them, just like you don't need to be able to decrypt a DVD in order to burn a copy.
You sound frustrated that philosophers aren't getting the credit they deserve. I'm curious, are you a philosopher?