Will AI solve the mind-body problem?

[Magical Realist]

Perhaps. But lacking a sentient physical body would seem to be a setback that it would have to overcome.

https://mindmatters.ai/2021/05/will-ai-c...y-problem/

"Part 1: How do we know we are not just physical bodies? The mind–body problem is one of the most difficult issues in modern philosophy. Philosopher Angus Menuge cites the immateriality and indivisibility of the mind and discusses the evidence from near-death experiences.

Part 2: If the mind and body are so different, how can they interact? A look at different models of the mind–body problem. Angus Menuge asks, Why should wanting a drink of milk produce physical changes like opening the fridge? It’s a harder question than many think.

Part 3: How have various thinkers tried to solve the mind–body problem? Philosopher Angus Menuge explains why traditional physicalism (the mind is just what the brain does) doesn’t really work. Some philosophers today claim that the mind is simply what the brain does; a newer group thinks the mind emerges from the brain but is not simply the brain.

Part 4: How would Angus Menuge resolve the mind–body problem? From his background in computer science, he sees mind–body interaction as a transmission of information between two realms. Menuge argues that our minds and bodies are one integrated system with a translation function … like developing and then writing down an idea."

[Ostronomos]

Part 3: How have various thinkers tried to solve the mind–body problem? Philosopher Angus Menuge explains why traditional physicalism (the mind is just what the brain does) doesn’t really work. Some philosophers today claim that the mind is simply what the brain does; a newer group thinks the mind emerges from the brain but is not simply the brain.

Psychedelic drugs prove that the mind's eye or the mind's visual stimuli, are the brain-in-action. However, an outstanding problem is how the mind causes wavefunction collapse. It seems that the mind is unbound or unlimited in nature. An energy.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/videos

[C C]

Perhaps. But lacking a sentient physical body would seem to be a setback that it would have to overcome.

https://mindmatters.ai/2021/05/will-ai-c...y-problem/

Materialism regards matter as spatial/quantitative relationships and properties. Physicalism embraces the conversion of the world to that abstract language of physics (if not the physical sciences in general). What's left out of that conceptual mapping is the original qualitative experiences of humans that such affairs were inferred and experimentally extracted from. (They're classed as subjective rather than objective: primary-secondary quality distinction.)

Since the "science" representation of the world itself systematically excluded, ignored, or excused private manifestations/feelings from any deep accountability other than that "they seem to be personally present" and had correlation to the brain, that's what the narrower "problem" actually stems from.

The other attributes of "mind" like intelligence, cognition, memory, etc fall out of spatial/quantitative relationships and properties, as demonstrated by computers, robots, etc. It may be that each mode and specific quale of phenomenal experience results from such arrangements as well, but there is no science that methodologically accounts for them and no overall list of "recipes" for generating them.

AI can only manipulate and evaluate in its own statistical way what humans have already written about the topic. AI is kind of like a (since birth) blind and deaf person who also suffers from total anaphia -- trying to explain what images, sounds, and tactile (skin) sensations are that s/he has never even experienced.

AI suffers from the symbol grounding problem. Just as a book has no presentational apprehension of the words and pictures printed on its pages and a television does not "see" or "hear" what's on its screen and emitting from its speakers... An AI has no knowledge in the form of manifestation concerning the data it is processing.

The "knowledge" it does have consists purely of governed relationships between its stored language objects. That's crudely akin to entries in a dictionary simply internally referring to each other for their meanings (there is no "jumping out" of the dictionary to the original world that is experienced by humans, only confinement to a version that has been converted to words).

In addition, research on phenomenal consciousness is plagued by disciplinary centrism. Biology, for instance, often regards itself as floating on its own when it comes to issues like this. Brain science (collectively) can only explain an issue in terms of the entities and concepts documented in its own domain and level of expertise. "Neural activity" is ultimately electrochemical activity, but the latter does not even have a capacity for phenomenal experience attributed to it as found in the rest of the universe (i.e., most natural philosophical and science orientations are implicity or in practice anti-panpsychism, if not via direct, formal declaration).

Only in the exalted confines of a skull do electrochemical processes "magically" or incoherently acquire this ability, and even then those "new properties" are not publicly detected. Biology and cognitive sciences are essentially encroaching on or dictating to physics that matter acquires novel characteristics (qualia, manifestations) when configured as functioning neural tissue. On the basis of people reporting that they privately witness such presentations and sensations -- but with no external verification of such properties actually subsisting in the brain matter or being the case.

The kind of institutionalized futility, as an explanation (again, stemming in part from disciplinary centrism), that results from purely focusing on a narrow _X_ with zero concern about how inconsistent it is with what has been established or asserted about the "big picture".