Suffice it to say that that each of yoru asertions are wrong. Wrong that we can't imagine a world without consciousness for exactly the reasons I delineated. Wrong about "emergent properties" being bull shit , a point I won't prove again and wrong about it not being anuncessary but extant 5th wheel to any theory which tries to make use of it.
Obviously, I disagree. Let's start with the first assertion. Do you know what consciousness and experience are so that you know when you are imaging their absence? I doubt it. I certainly don't have that knowledge.
Further, you have yet to establish why consciousness appears. I believe presence of a sufficiently complex (in various ways) physical system is necessary and sufficient. Merely imaging a copy of our universe without consciousness then becomes futile since it would have consciousness as well in contradiction of your desired imagining.
Emergent properties are properties of a thing that
1) posess casual power independent of the thing
2) are nevertheless somehow dependent upon the underlying "thing" in order to "emerge"
3) the effects of that casual power the emergent properties posess are not reducible in any deterministic way to the effects of the underlying "thing" from which the emergent property emerges.
1) and 3) aren't true. Emergent properties are dependent on the underlying constituent parts and their properties. For example, the many physical states and properties of matter such as a variety of solids (eg, crystal, glass, conducting and superconducting, transparent/translucent/opaque, color, etc are all well defined and easily observed emergent properties. And none of these properties has causal power beyond that of the constituent parts.
And 3) is wrong simply because there's numerous examples of many different constituent parts with many different properties yet resulting in overlapping emergent properties. The classic example is vibration. The average orchestra generates vibration in many different ways, such as vibration of a reed, of lips, or the skin of a drum. If you were to start with the vibration, you would have difficulty determining what generated the vibration. I think for example, it would be possible for a specially manufactured violin and trumpet to sound alike including overtones even though the modes of vibrations are different in each.
Thus, it would not be possible in that last example to distinguish the underlying constituent parts because the emergent property of vibration didn't have sufficient information to resolve the underlying cause.That in turn implies your assertion that the emergent property is "not reducible in any deterministic way to the effects of the underlying "thing" from which the emergent property emerges". It turns out you are saying less than you thought you were.
And if one thinks about emergent properties, point 3) is an expected outcome. You are discussing collapsing the properties of a many bodied system into a few emergent properties. There is a necessary loss of information and hence, a necessary inability to fully reconstruct the original system just from the description of the emergent properties.
and wrong about it not being anuncessary but extant 5th wheel to any theory which tries to make use of it
The obvious rebuttal is that if consciousness physically is an emergent property, then it doe
Please explain why taxes shouldn't be paid unless every random joe you meet proves to you personally that they care what the taxes are spent on?
Because otherwise taxes get spent on utterly retarded stuff.
And why misspent tax doesn't mean that taxes have already been lowered, and yet the corporations and rich fuckwits (such as you wish to become, if it weren't for the niggers and liberals fucking things up for you, because they hate you for your potential success...?) still have avoided taxes, indicating that the problem isn't that the taxes are high at all, but that they don't want to pay at all.
Misspent taxes means the government has too much money.
"Its easy to live like a rich man if you don't pay your bills."
So you don't actually agree. And what bills really are we speaking of here? Defense contractors? The growing sums of money transferred. reverse Robin Hood-style, from the young poor to elderly rich? Interest payments from people too irresponsible to spend within their means for generations to the banks, foreign countries, and anyone else who holds US bonds and treasuries? Welp, I just specified 80% of the current US government's spending.
Great. Tell me how they survive. Remembering that broken bolt could mean death. They have 3d printing?
Sure.
Where's the plastic come from... no hydrocarbons on Mars.
The atmosphere. Electrolysis of water yields hydrogen which while under heat and pressure converts to methane via the Sabatier reaction. That in turn can be reacted to form ethene, the building block of most plastics.
They have nuclear power? uh, where's the mine for the fuel?
They have plenty of solar power.
The immediate future belongs to robots.
Which is irrelevant since we're not speaking of the immediate future.
Imagine shipping people off to the harshest environment on earth. Do you think they would survive w/o resupply or support?
If they're trying to make a self-sufficient colony (at least for basic resources like food, air, water, energy), then sure, I have no trouble imagining that.
Now, make that environment FAR harsher... no air, hard to get water, bathed in radiation, nearest support is tens of millions of miles away. Do you still blithely say "no problem, they'll do fine"?
Why wouldn't I? It's not like they have a choice. I get the impression, yet again, that hard problems are being conflated with impossible ones.
That information has to be valuable first. Information about Mars is going to be much more valuable to colonists on Mars than to anyone staying on Earth.
Well, then the inhabitants should also plan on paying full freight for food, air, water.
Why would they ship those things when they can just obtain that locally? Remember the whole point of a Mars colony is that it is self-sufficient for the basic human needs.
Depends on the reasons. Running science experiments on Mars isn't very useful, if no one will ever live there. While having a repairman on the Moon to handle a few tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure is at least useful.
Or the immense scourge of misogynistic gamers. $20 billion a year is not too much to ask to fight corpse humping in Counter-Strike. That's what you meant by CS right?
It can't cost much if you get a letter from a court telling you to take down post X, Y and Z.
How often do you think such a letter is issued per year? 100 times perhaps, so 100 posts per year per company. Can't hardly cost them anything.
All fine as long as long as those courts never build up an expectation that these companies should be preemptively anticipating the court order or develop seriously automated mechanics that ramp up the number of letters from the court by many orders of magnitude. If your business has to process a billion orders a minute, then that's a more substantial impairment of the business. Similarly, if the court starts fining businesses for not removing illegal content sufficiently fast, that's another ugly consequence.
75 years ago, it was a lot simpler system with the media companies of that time having total control over what ends up published and courts had limited technical means with which to discern and compel compliance with the law.
What I am obviously saying is they do not correlate to the things in the external world I thought they did. They are real the way illusions are real illusions. They're real (an illusion is a real phenomena), but their designated referents are not real.
Note that I did, fully answer your posed question. The applicability of the belief doesn't change the reality of the belief. That's a different thing.
And beliefs are experientially highly dependent on how closely and extensively you test those beliefs. For example, if I believe that the Moon is made of green cheese, and no one can be bothered to test my assertion at even the simplest of levels (even to the rudimentary observation that the Moon is not green in color, which would require at least some elaboration of my belief in order to explain that) nor do I ever try to go to the Moon to get some of that delicious cheese, then the belief is real enough. It doesn't attempt to explain anything that I experience and hence, is just as real as any other similarly untested belief that I should happen to have, no matter how correct that belief happens to be.
Sure I have a reason. For the same reason no other phenomena has ever had an "emergent" property which also posessed ontological independence. Because reductionism is how things ARE. Things are made up of their parts, and how those parts interact with the world and other parts determine completely how the thing behaves.
No. Reductionism doesn't explain initial conditions (going beyond the anthropic principle). To be blunt, I think it quite reasonable that the fact that consciousness exists in the universe is an imposed precondition of WOOFYGOOFY the observer and any other observers whose preconditions are compatible with those of WOOFYGOOFY.
I am claiming that experience exists independently of brains and gives rise to the perception that there are brains.
And I can claim that the Moon is made of green cheese. We need more than claims here.
You're doing a lot of interrogating and accusing but sliding by without answering the troubling questions which issue directly from your own theory. Can a Turing tape machine be conscious and if not then why not? Are some suitably complex machines already conscious to some degree and if not, then why not? Start there.
Sure, why wouldn't an appropriately programmed Turing tape machine be conscious? Or for that matter, not just conscious, but encoding the full extent of our universe and all the conscious beings who dwell therein. The infinite computational machine is a really big thing. Who knows, we may all be running on a Turing machine equivalent (or perhaps a semi-quantum version of it)?
I don't know if there are already human-made machines which achieve some degree of consciousness, but it's not something I'd rule out.
And honestly, I don't see these questions as being troubling. It's not any more troubling to say that a Turing machine can be conscious (or much more than that), than it is to say that a few kilograms of goo can be conscious.
So that's where we are. But since there IS experience, where do you go? You go with the obvious other possibility, although it's counter-intuitive to the limit of that word. You say "I cannot deny experience. Any construction of the universe which excludes it ontologically (as ours does) must be in error, no matter how compelling it seems to me. That is what I am arguing for.
The odd thing here is that our models of the universe don't exclude "experience" ontologically or otherwise. I don't see anything here to rebut either. Bad priors, bad conclusions (or GIGO). Too bad since you've given this a lot of thought.
Even if brains are necessary for minds (experience, consciousness some how needs them to manifest- not something I myself believe ) they are not sufficient.
They are not sufficient because we can imagine a brain working and causing all the effects it does without a shred of conscious experience.
No, actually we can't imagine that assertion of the second paragraph. My view is that if we couldt he above, we would just be agreeing with my original stance, not have this particular argument at all, and nuanced disagreement would be elsewhere.
Experience is an phenomena the universe just doesn't need . I could create a parallel, stone cold dead no-experince universe with animals and people and everything and it would run just like our own. The only difference is, ours has experience and the other one doesn't.
Then do so. Create this sterile universe, rather than merely say that you can. Then we can compare the two and see if there actually is anything different about them.
If I can account for the all the workings of brains without experience then how are you, asa good scientist going to add it back in? Where are you going to do this in the process? Anywhere you try, I can say "and here you come with your ghost in the machine". I will be scientifcally rigorous and you will be injecting mystical entities into biochemical, or molecular or electrical events governed and account for 100% by the dead-unconscious no-experience here folks laws of physics, of things just bumping into things, or more modernly, of forces acting on particles..
You haven't actually accounted for what you claim here. And if you can observe something, then it is no longer mystical.
There are quoted here, three spectacular and completely unfounded assertions. I realize that this is just the traditional abuse of a poor rhetorical tool (rather than say, a serious claim that you can create universes), but I think it's another symptom of rather sloppy reasoning.
Moving on, strong AI would also be able to exploit each of your objections. After all, we can keep adding things until we do get consciousness (the brain indicates this process is not that hard once you have a sufficiently sophisticated system in which to manifest consciousness. Also, I don't consider complexity to be a directly ordered set BTW.). Second, consciousness in strong AI is no more or less precluded by our models of reality than the brain is. Since we're asserting consciousness exists, then the models are just as right or wrong for strong AI as they are for the human brain).
Third, we don't rule out phenomena in science just because it doesn't fit models. Instead, the model changes (or more accurately, new models are created to account for the new phenomena). Experience exists therefore, if we want to model it, we include it. "Ghost in the machine" is one such way to attempt that. Whatever models we develop would have to account for what we think happens in human brains. And thus, would allow for the same phenomena in similar systems which are not human brains.
And that's a problem because "consciousness" or it's more precise definition "experience" even if you allow that it is dependent on brains or complex machines to manifest (and I am not saying I do) is a phenomena which nevertheless is not a brain or complex machine and is has no credible reductionist (scientific) pathway from either of those things.
Let's think about what you just wrote. You admit that consciousness is a phenomena and hence, observable. You then admit that the only place you've observed it is in brains. I'm not seeing an argument which I can rebut here. But I'll look at your next, more extensive reply to see if you have anything there.
We don't assign experience to a watch; it "knows" nothing even though it "tells" time- a complex task. And so also with any even more complicated machines. At some undefined point of complexity, you claim a ghost enters the machine, and lo, the machine is having experience. But do one computation differently and no experience is being had.
Telling time is as complex as intellectual tasks, like abstracting ideas from patterns? Do tell. And no, I do not make the "ghost enters the machine" argument. I see no reason to expect consciousness to be a bit you set, but like so many other things, a gradual attribute.
You can't see the trees, fish, and microorganisms? The breathable air at the correct temperature and pressure? The correct gravity and the magnetosphere?
Well, I do see trees. I don't see any of those other things in the pictures. Which strikes me as a very poor argument (one thing out of 6 or so items) to make as a result.
One of the things you notice about the pretty Earth picture is that no one lives there. Once you have people living there, things look different and they often look just as barren as the Mars picture.
Even an inescapable observer bias, even an inescapable, undetected and undetect-able observer bias still admits of a real, if never-to-be-known objective reality. So that's still not solipsism.
Unless, of course, that objective reality exists solely because you observe it and the other observers. It's not as strong as if you're making everything up, but there is a possibility here that reality exists as it does because of characteristics of an observer of that reality.
in what sense are my beliefs real
In a very strong sense, since they have a physical representation as knowledge in your brain.
Solipsism in particular, which is what the OP seems to be heading into, has been well explored.
Solipsism may also be a real thing. Modern physical theories remain stubbornly attached to a bunch of arbitrary parameters. Those parameters may have the values they have because you observed them that way.
I am saying that computers can't auto-generate a class of (real, actual) thing via "emergent properties" by dint of being "sufficiently complex". That's pholigston-level hand waving and appeal-to-noun-phrase.
And do you have a reason for saying this? I'm seeing the same pattern again. Assertions made with absolutely nothing to back them up.
My view is that brains already generate experience and consciousness. We have an existence proof that it can be done. Even if consciousness is an external property/deeper reality that somehow attaches to some or all human brains, there's still no reason to expect that it won't similarly be able to attach to similarly complex human-made machines.
Whatever hand waving you apply to rationalize why human brains are a seat of experience can similarly be applied to any other system with the same attributes.
Slashdot Mirror
OK khallow you're the climate change denying troll that is the ONE person I actually did mark as a troll in my control panel.
Here's some background on that. I think no further comment is required.
Suffice it to say that that each of yoru asertions are wrong. Wrong that we can't imagine a world without consciousness for exactly the reasons I delineated. Wrong about "emergent properties" being bull shit , a point I won't prove again and wrong about it not being anuncessary but extant 5th wheel to any theory which tries to make use of it.
Obviously, I disagree. Let's start with the first assertion. Do you know what consciousness and experience are so that you know when you are imaging their absence? I doubt it. I certainly don't have that knowledge.
Further, you have yet to establish why consciousness appears. I believe presence of a sufficiently complex (in various ways) physical system is necessary and sufficient. Merely imaging a copy of our universe without consciousness then becomes futile since it would have consciousness as well in contradiction of your desired imagining.
Wrong about "emergent properties" being bull shit
Let's look at your definition of emergent properties:
Emergent properties are properties of a thing that
1) posess casual power independent of the thing
2) are nevertheless somehow dependent upon the underlying "thing" in order to "emerge"
3) the effects of that casual power the emergent properties posess are not reducible in any deterministic way to the effects of the underlying "thing" from which the emergent property emerges.
1) and 3) aren't true. Emergent properties are dependent on the underlying constituent parts and their properties. For example, the many physical states and properties of matter such as a variety of solids (eg, crystal, glass, conducting and superconducting, transparent/translucent/opaque, color, etc are all well defined and easily observed emergent properties. And none of these properties has causal power beyond that of the constituent parts.
And 3) is wrong simply because there's numerous examples of many different constituent parts with many different properties yet resulting in overlapping emergent properties. The classic example is vibration. The average orchestra generates vibration in many different ways, such as vibration of a reed, of lips, or the skin of a drum. If you were to start with the vibration, you would have difficulty determining what generated the vibration. I think for example, it would be possible for a specially manufactured violin and trumpet to sound alike including overtones even though the modes of vibrations are different in each.
Thus, it would not be possible in that last example to distinguish the underlying constituent parts because the emergent property of vibration didn't have sufficient information to resolve the underlying cause.That in turn implies your assertion that the emergent property is "not reducible in any deterministic way to the effects of the underlying "thing" from which the emergent property emerges". It turns out you are saying less than you thought you were.
And if one thinks about emergent properties, point 3) is an expected outcome. You are discussing collapsing the properties of a many bodied system into a few emergent properties. There is a necessary loss of information and hence, a necessary inability to fully reconstruct the original system just from the description of the emergent properties.
and wrong about it not being anuncessary but extant 5th wheel to any theory which tries to make use of it
The obvious rebuttal is that if consciousness physically is an emergent property, then it doe
Please explain why taxes shouldn't be paid unless every random joe you meet proves to you personally that they care what the taxes are spent on?
Because otherwise taxes get spent on utterly retarded stuff.
And why misspent tax doesn't mean that taxes have already been lowered, and yet the corporations and rich fuckwits (such as you wish to become, if it weren't for the niggers and liberals fucking things up for you, because they hate you for your potential success...?) still have avoided taxes, indicating that the problem isn't that the taxes are high at all, but that they don't want to pay at all.
Misspent taxes means the government has too much money.
"Its easy to live like a rich man if you don't pay your bills."
So you don't actually agree. And what bills really are we speaking of here? Defense contractors? The growing sums of money transferred. reverse Robin Hood-style, from the young poor to elderly rich? Interest payments from people too irresponsible to spend within their means for generations to the banks, foreign countries, and anyone else who holds US bonds and treasuries? Welp, I just specified 80% of the current US government's spending.
I'm not impressed by the bills.
Great. Tell me how they survive. Remembering that broken bolt could mean death. They have 3d printing?
Sure.
Where's the plastic come from... no hydrocarbons on Mars.
The atmosphere. Electrolysis of water yields hydrogen which while under heat and pressure converts to methane via the Sabatier reaction. That in turn can be reacted to form ethene, the building block of most plastics.
They have nuclear power? uh, where's the mine for the fuel?
They have plenty of solar power.
The immediate future belongs to robots.
Which is irrelevant since we're not speaking of the immediate future.
Imagine shipping people off to the harshest environment on earth. Do you think they would survive w/o resupply or support?
If they're trying to make a self-sufficient colony (at least for basic resources like food, air, water, energy), then sure, I have no trouble imagining that.
Now, make that environment FAR harsher ... no air, hard to get water, bathed in radiation, nearest support is tens of millions of miles away. Do you still blithely say "no problem, they'll do fine"?
Why wouldn't I? It's not like they have a choice. I get the impression, yet again, that hard problems are being conflated with impossible ones.
That information has to be valuable first. Information about Mars is going to be much more valuable to colonists on Mars than to anyone staying on Earth.
Well, then the inhabitants should also plan on paying full freight for food, air, water.
Why would they ship those things when they can just obtain that locally? Remember the whole point of a Mars colony is that it is self-sufficient for the basic human needs.
Depends on the reasons. Running science experiments on Mars isn't very useful, if no one will ever live there. While having a repairman on the Moon to handle a few tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure is at least useful.
Canada and Australia are not independent. They still swear allegiance to the Royal House of Britain.
Which is not a serious criteria for dependence. If the Queen tried to pull anything, they'd drop her like a bad diet.
And if the US had not fought a war for independence, it is likely that all the colonies would still be more tightly controlled by England.
Or at least more competently managed.
I don't see that in the picture either. Yet another poor argument for using those pictures.
Except that it's not a lot of people that would make a lot of money. It's a few people are making obscene amounts of money by not paying taxes.
So what do you think of the earlier poster's claim that it's easy to make a profit, if you don't pay the proper taxes?
Entitled people want the products of taxes (law and order, et al) but believe others should pay for it.
That applies to you as well. I want to see you care about what the money is spent on, before I care whether Apple pays for it.
It's easy to make a lot of money if you don't pay the proper taxes.
Sounds like a great reason to lower taxes then. I'd rather make a lot of money for a lot of people, than pay "proper" taxes.
Or the immense scourge of misogynistic gamers. $20 billion a year is not too much to ask to fight corpse humping in Counter-Strike. That's what you meant by CS right?
It can't cost much if you get a letter from a court telling you to take down post X, Y and Z.
How often do you think such a letter is issued per year? 100 times perhaps, so 100 posts per year per company. Can't hardly cost them anything.
All fine as long as long as those courts never build up an expectation that these companies should be preemptively anticipating the court order or develop seriously automated mechanics that ramp up the number of letters from the court by many orders of magnitude. If your business has to process a billion orders a minute, then that's a more substantial impairment of the business. Similarly, if the court starts fining businesses for not removing illegal content sufficiently fast, that's another ugly consequence.
75 years ago, it was a lot simpler system with the media companies of that time having total control over what ends up published and courts had limited technical means with which to discern and compel compliance with the law.
What I am obviously saying is they do not correlate to the things in the external world I thought they did. They are real the way illusions are real illusions. They're real (an illusion is a real phenomena), but their designated referents are not real.
Note that I did, fully answer your posed question. The applicability of the belief doesn't change the reality of the belief. That's a different thing.
And beliefs are experientially highly dependent on how closely and extensively you test those beliefs. For example, if I believe that the Moon is made of green cheese, and no one can be bothered to test my assertion at even the simplest of levels (even to the rudimentary observation that the Moon is not green in color, which would require at least some elaboration of my belief in order to explain that) nor do I ever try to go to the Moon to get some of that delicious cheese, then the belief is real enough. It doesn't attempt to explain anything that I experience and hence, is just as real as any other similarly untested belief that I should happen to have, no matter how correct that belief happens to be.
Sure I have a reason. For the same reason no other phenomena has ever had an "emergent" property which also posessed ontological independence. Because reductionism is how things ARE. Things are made up of their parts, and how those parts interact with the world and other parts determine completely how the thing behaves.
No. Reductionism doesn't explain initial conditions (going beyond the anthropic principle). To be blunt, I think it quite reasonable that the fact that consciousness exists in the universe is an imposed precondition of WOOFYGOOFY the observer and any other observers whose preconditions are compatible with those of WOOFYGOOFY.
I am claiming that experience exists independently of brains and gives rise to the perception that there are brains.
And I can claim that the Moon is made of green cheese. We need more than claims here.
You're doing a lot of interrogating and accusing but sliding by without answering the troubling questions which issue directly from your own theory. Can a Turing tape machine be conscious and if not then why not? Are some suitably complex machines already conscious to some degree and if not, then why not? Start there.
Sure, why wouldn't an appropriately programmed Turing tape machine be conscious? Or for that matter, not just conscious, but encoding the full extent of our universe and all the conscious beings who dwell therein. The infinite computational machine is a really big thing. Who knows, we may all be running on a Turing machine equivalent (or perhaps a semi-quantum version of it)?
I don't know if there are already human-made machines which achieve some degree of consciousness, but it's not something I'd rule out.
And honestly, I don't see these questions as being troubling. It's not any more troubling to say that a Turing machine can be conscious (or much more than that), than it is to say that a few kilograms of goo can be conscious.
So that's where we are. But since there IS experience, where do you go? You go with the obvious other possibility, although it's counter-intuitive to the limit of that word. You say "I cannot deny experience. Any construction of the universe which excludes it ontologically (as ours does) must be in error, no matter how compelling it seems to me. That is what I am arguing for.
The odd thing here is that our models of the universe don't exclude "experience" ontologically or otherwise. I don't see anything here to rebut either. Bad priors, bad conclusions (or GIGO). Too bad since you've given this a lot of thought.
Even if brains are necessary for minds (experience, consciousness some how needs them to manifest- not something I myself believe ) they are not sufficient.
They are not sufficient because we can imagine a brain working and causing all the effects it does without a shred of conscious experience.
No, actually we can't imagine that assertion of the second paragraph. My view is that if we couldt he above, we would just be agreeing with my original stance, not have this particular argument at all, and nuanced disagreement would be elsewhere.
Experience is an phenomena the universe just doesn't need . I could create a parallel, stone cold dead no-experince universe with animals and people and everything and it would run just like our own. The only difference is, ours has experience and the other one doesn't.
Then do so. Create this sterile universe, rather than merely say that you can. Then we can compare the two and see if there actually is anything different about them.
If I can account for the all the workings of brains without experience then how are you, asa good scientist going to add it back in? Where are you going to do this in the process? Anywhere you try, I can say "and here you come with your ghost in the machine". I will be scientifcally rigorous and you will be injecting mystical entities into biochemical, or molecular or electrical events governed and account for 100% by the dead-unconscious no-experience here folks laws of physics, of things just bumping into things, or more modernly, of forces acting on particles..
You haven't actually accounted for what you claim here. And if you can observe something, then it is no longer mystical.
There are quoted here, three spectacular and completely unfounded assertions. I realize that this is just the traditional abuse of a poor rhetorical tool (rather than say, a serious claim that you can create universes), but I think it's another symptom of rather sloppy reasoning.
Moving on, strong AI would also be able to exploit each of your objections. After all, we can keep adding things until we do get consciousness (the brain indicates this process is not that hard once you have a sufficiently sophisticated system in which to manifest consciousness. Also, I don't consider complexity to be a directly ordered set BTW.). Second, consciousness in strong AI is no more or less precluded by our models of reality than the brain is. Since we're asserting consciousness exists, then the models are just as right or wrong for strong AI as they are for the human brain).
Third, we don't rule out phenomena in science just because it doesn't fit models. Instead, the model changes (or more accurately, new models are created to account for the new phenomena). Experience exists therefore, if we want to model it, we include it. "Ghost in the machine" is one such way to attempt that. Whatever models we develop would have to account for what we think happens in human brains. And thus, would allow for the same phenomena in similar systems which are not human brains.
And that's a problem because "consciousness" or it's more precise definition "experience" even if you allow that it is dependent on brains or complex machines to manifest (and I am not saying I do) is a phenomena which nevertheless is not a brain or complex machine and is has no credible reductionist (scientific) pathway from either of those things.
Let's think about what you just wrote. You admit that consciousness is a phenomena and hence, observable. You then admit that the only place you've observed it is in brains. I'm not seeing an argument which I can rebut here. But I'll look at your next, more extensive reply to see if you have anything there.
We don't assign experience to a watch; it "knows" nothing even though it "tells" time- a complex task. And so also with any even more complicated machines. At some undefined point of complexity, you claim a ghost enters the machine, and lo, the machine is having experience. But do one computation differently and no experience is being had.
Telling time is as complex as intellectual tasks, like abstracting ideas from patterns? Do tell. And no, I do not make the "ghost enters the machine" argument. I see no reason to expect consciousness to be a bit you set, but like so many other things, a gradual attribute.
You can't see the trees, fish, and microorganisms? The breathable air at the correct temperature and pressure? The correct gravity and the magnetosphere?
Well, I do see trees. I don't see any of those other things in the pictures. Which strikes me as a very poor argument (one thing out of 6 or so items) to make as a result.
One of the things you notice about the pretty Earth picture is that no one lives there. Once you have people living there, things look different and they often look just as barren as the Mars picture.
That's not quite solipsism.
And it's not quite not solipsism.
Even an inescapable observer bias, even an inescapable, undetected and undetect-able observer bias still admits of a real, if never-to-be-known objective reality. So that's still not solipsism.
Unless, of course, that objective reality exists solely because you observe it and the other observers. It's not as strong as if you're making everything up, but there is a possibility here that reality exists as it does because of characteristics of an observer of that reality.
in what sense are my beliefs real
In a very strong sense, since they have a physical representation as knowledge in your brain.
Solipsism in particular, which is what the OP seems to be heading into, has been well explored.
Solipsism may also be a real thing. Modern physical theories remain stubbornly attached to a bunch of arbitrary parameters. Those parameters may have the values they have because you observed them that way.
I am saying that computers can't auto-generate a class of (real, actual) thing via "emergent properties" by dint of being "sufficiently complex". That's pholigston-level hand waving and appeal-to-noun-phrase.
And do you have a reason for saying this? I'm seeing the same pattern again. Assertions made with absolutely nothing to back them up.
My view is that brains already generate experience and consciousness. We have an existence proof that it can be done. Even if consciousness is an external property/deeper reality that somehow attaches to some or all human brains, there's still no reason to expect that it won't similarly be able to attach to similarly complex human-made machines.
Whatever hand waving you apply to rationalize why human brains are a seat of experience can similarly be applied to any other system with the same attributes.
OK in the context of this conversation that qualifies as "assuming the consequent".
Ok, what's being assumed and why is that a problem?