Except it's not what the evidence suggests. We have yet to find physical evidence of consciousness. We have yet to find a way to accurately simulate a neuron in any falsifiable way (seriously look into the detractors and counterarguments to the fly study, it's amazing that 3d graphics can trick that many people). But even beyond neurons we cannot accurately link brain activity to behavior in anything but a superficial way. We have no insight into how decisions are made or what ultimately drives them.

More importantly, if the world is deterministic, all meaning in life is gone. Completely. And the second it is objectively proven most people will kill themselves. Any intelligent being would kill itself, since that's the logical next step in the chain of thought and it wouldn't have a choice.

Meaning the universe is flawed if the point of it is to create life, and if there is no point to the universe and it's purely deterministic, we are in a worse hell than has ever been imagined in the totality of human expression. Arguably the worst possible hell there could ever be.

Nonexistence would be the infinitely better option.

Seems to me you think there's something special about humans, I don't believe there's any proof to that.

I don’t, though. I get where you’re coming from, because I too often point out other people’s hidden assumptions about things like a soul or magic sauce to consciousness. I don’t subscribe. I follow something closer to a procedural understanding of consciousness.

that doesn't mean it's impossible to simulate.

I think it does. You aren’t going to simulate human consciousness if human consciousness is a procedure. At least, not how you’d simulate stock exchanges.

The difference is simulation versus synthesis. Your simulation would be a feed forward process and humans are not feed forward processes. Humans are phenomenologically driven entities. Your simulation would be a behaviorally consistent model at best — no phenomenology. Sorry to say, but that’s just not the same thing. It wouldn’t work the same way, wouldn’t feel the same, and you definitely wouldn’t have “figured out consciousness” just by building such a simulation. It would be a neat toy, like LLMs, but it wouldn’t be sentient. That’s obvious to me.

There's no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.

Yeah, and I’m really not arguing for a soul. I’m arguing that simulation is subpar to recreation. If you simulated every neuron, you haven’t achieved anything really remarkable — except an awesome benchmark for computer power and a place in the history book. That’s it.

If you want a grand unifying theory of consciousness, you need to understand that phenomenology (the thing science ignores) is pretty damn central to the whole thing. That’s not arguing for a soul. That’s saying, pinch yourself — you are awake and you are not a robot.

There is some evidence that will is preceded by action, not the other way around. Good point.

However, if the illusion is of agency—then it’s not really an illusion of consciousness. It’s more of a free will problem.

If the argument is that consciousness is only the misconception within an object that it has agency, then you’re still doing some magic handwaving. How did the object become capable of misconceiving anything? That would mean it was already conscious.

Edit: if the idea is that consciousness is only a behavioral pattern displayed by lifeforms with an internal self model, I’d need to think on that a bit. That’s pretty interesting.

I assume the claim would be that the experience of consciousness is one where a physically stateful information-processing system models itself, e.g., as a means to control its body or its behavior.

when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.

Right, like a blob of cells modeling its holistic self as one—assuming the identity of the model. Then believing, as the model, that they are in control of the model. Is that it?

Hmm. There’d still be quite a bit of explaining to do… like how a set of cells, none of which with the ability to model, identify, or believe suddenly contain these abilities en mass. That’s called emergence, which I think typically just means we misunderstand how something works.

perhaps those external stimuli are always present in some form, even if they are extremely minimal, indirect, or invisible to us at first glance.

I still think the connection between external stimuli and consciousness are a lot more glaring than what you realize. After all it is how we medically determine consciousness in humans. Our ability to process and respond to external stimuli is a direct reflection of our somatic and autonomic physiology.

We could even say that it may be impossible to isolate the mind completely from all stimulation in the first place.

You can, it's called anesthesia.

In that sense, the claim becomes less about the absence of stimulation and more about how little stimulation is actually enough to sustain consciousness or mental activity.

Its interdependent on your period of development. In gestation unborn infants produce more grey matter than what is really needed to sustain life and can get by with internal stimuli and the external stimuli provided by the womb. However as we develop we become more dependent on higher and higher levels of interaction with our environment to develop our mental capacity.

If a person were to be put under anesthesia since early development or e acquired a tbi that made them unresponsive at an early age, they would all likely mentally deteriorate to a persistent vegetative state.