They believe it's not possible to explain human consciousness as a purely physical concept. I don't see why they need to explain what it is that isn't material to make that claim.
This sort of reminds me of the people who claim the Big Bang is incoherent because we don’t know what came before it. Why is I don’t know not good enough?
The thing is this non material whatever can’t have properties. If it stores information, has state and has consistent behaviour then really it’s just a form of material (in the philosophical sense that it’s a part of the world), so it can’t have any of those. At which point, how does it even interact with the world at all? I mean if it influences the brain, then that mechanism of influence makes it part of the world, right? It makes it material.
That’s where I find the idea incoherent. I don’t see how it can be both immaterial but also have material effects. Doing so makes it material, I think by definition. It means it must be part of material reality in that sense. Or at least I’d like to hear an argument why it doesn’t.
"Non-material" just sounds like a bad label for material things we don't understand.
We don't understand how our cognition or consciousness works, but it seems silly to assume that because we don't understand we fundamentally can't understand.
People who push the mysterious interpretation of dualism are just trying to find a place for the divine that is separate from the material but in doing so they baselessly seek to circumscribe our capacity to understand.
If the extra thing dualism adds is just behaviours of matter, how is that different from materialism?
We say that we can experience thinking about an Apple, or imagining an Apple. I see no reason why a computer, or other physically implemented AGI system, could not do that. I suspect the act of imagination is just generating, processing and transforming a computational model abstracting the thing being imagined.
I believe brains are physical objects, so therefore physical objects can imagine Apples.
You can't touch fourier transforms either, but a human brain or a microchip can compute them.
I can make the computer imagine Quake for me, then fiddle with its plane of imagination for some sweet wallhacks.
Using vaguely-defined words to support a deist position is a time-honored tradition, but isn't particularly interesting or convincing.
A collection of neurons can build a model of the world that includes its experience of apples, and from that, dedicate some neurons to representing a particular instance of an apple. This model isn't the reality of "Apples", though, and is physically located in the brain.
Sure there is, that’s what DeepMind showed us with how to find cats in images :)
There exist many things many humans have lumped together under a single label such as "cat". Those categories are all wrong, but sometimes they're useful. Machines can also get in on the fun, just as well as humans, as you point out. There's no magic there, humans aren't special.
This has the benefit that it empirically fits how people think about it. Nobody thinks a rock has free will. Some people think animals have free will. Lots of people think humans have free will. This is everybody trying to smush a vague concept into the very simple, intuitive definition above.
Which is all to say that free will is about as relevant to any conversation as say astrology is: not one bit.