The fact of the matter is the following: certain pieces of matter seem to be associated with consciousness.
My brain connected with the wires to your brain. Now, if I add lots and lots and lots of wires, at some point, if I add one more wire, suddenly the complexity (this Phi measure of our integrated brain) will exceed that of my brain by itself and of your brain by itself. At that point, what will happen? Hans? Gone. Christof? Gone. Instead, there will be this new über-mind, okay, this new amalgamation of Hans and Christoph that’ll see out of four eyes, that will have two mouths, four limbs, et cetera.
At least according to IIT, the only way to overcome this dissociation—we could all be a group mind, which means a single mind—but we would have to use some technological means to directly interface my neurons with your neurons with the neurons of everyone else.
It’s not there’s something magical about brains. It’s not that we have a soul-like substance. Because in principle, if you build silicon in the image of humans—so-called neuromorphic engineering, with sort of the same type of design, but now in silicon rather with than with bilipid membranes—then in principle you can get human-level consciousness. There’s nothing magical about it. But you can’t simulate it. And this is a challenge for most of today, because we learned over the last fifty years: well, I can simulate anything. Today I can buy a video game that looks almost completely realistic. I can go into 3D and I can play with an avatar, and they look ever more realistic. So why can’t I do that with consciousness?
We have to be able to take these extraordinary experiences and try to incorporate them into our science and also into our metaphysics.
