That's not what I mean actually. If we could make a carbon copy of a person, it would be presumably be conscious too. But I do think that an attempt to model the brain mathematically and run a computer simulation of it would fail to create consciousness.
Ah, then we're much closer together than I thought.
However, there is no reason future computers will be limited to current (Turing) technology instead of being a collection of many co-processors with differing capabilities.
The main point though, is that since consciousness is housed in the physical brain, we can dissect, understand, and recreate fully-functional synthetic versions. While each person is in their own subjective world, the brain which is responsible for it is an objective object that is open to study.
>However, there is no reason future computers will be limited to current (Turing) technology instead of being a collection of many co-processors with differing capabilities.
That would violate the Church-Turing thesis, which is pretty widely accepted, unless the universe itself is a hypercomputer that we can leverage to perform computation.
You're essentially saying that our brains can't exist.
But they do, and we can copy them, what is the problem with making a synthetic brain? Why is the natural brain an allowed exception, but the one we make is not allowed?
Edit:
On the one hand you want to use Church-Turing to invalidate the possibility of us creating non-Turing based technology, and yet in a previous post you claimed the human brain likely violates Church-Turing. So which is it? Is reality allowed to violate Church-Turing or is it not?
If you honestly believe that the human brain violates Church-Turing, then you have to explain why you also believe that we can not copy the brain and achieve the same result ourselves.
If the universe is not computable, and if the non-computable aspects are relevant to the functioning of the human brain, then our ability to build a brain simulation is strongly limited. A functioning synthetic brain would have to leverage the same relevant natural phenomenon as a real brain; a mathematical simulation running on a standard computer would not suffice.
I do think that I actually agree with your earlier point that once we have a functioning synthetic brain, we can ignore subjective experience itself and just focus on its functional implications for the entire system.
