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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

>Building some intelligent machine is still possible within this limit. There is an example that it is possible: the human brain.

Assuming the human brain to be a mere machine.

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Dualist priors have not yet been shown to be useful.

are you including stuff like Taoism in that?

Neither have non-dualist priors. The nature of consciousness is as mysterious as it ever was. We have cracked a wide range of the soft problems, but the hard problem remains.

The "hard problem" of consciousness only exists if you start out with a dualist prior. Otherwise it is mysterious in the same way as the non-symmetry of matter and antimatter is mysterious -- it is not explained.

Lightning may look perfectly suitable for scientific investigation now, but it was as much a "hard problem" in other times.

The hard problem does not depend on our scientific understanding of the material world. Comparing the current situation in philosophy to the situation in physics 400 years ago is a false analogy, which doesn't take the fundamental difference between science and philosophy into consideration. Philosophy is about how we humans conceive the world, while physics attempts to describe a world seperate from our perception. As the failure of the object-subject duality has shown, that is impossible. There is no 'real', 'external', 'absolute', 'underlying' world to describe, because talking about it doesn't make any sense. We aren't brains in an 'absolute reality'. If you keep thinking about it in that way, you fundamentally misunderstand the key philosophical issues surrounding the hard problem.

"Nothing is 'mere'" - Richard Feynman

http://lesswrong.com/lw/or/joy_in_the_merely_real/

Funnily enough I was going to say 'mere' but checked myself and suppressed my inner pedant.

eh? You did say 'mere'...

I mean I was going to say "'mere'" as in emphasise that the the use of mere wasn't belittling as the scope of machines working on established physical principles is clearly pretty huge.

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