Thanks again for all the information! 🙏

I’ve vastly improved my essay already 😊

I also learnt a great deal. I am used to just thinking of brains as machinery ⚙️…

There actually is a position a bit like that … 🤷🏼‍♀️

You mean the one with the “homunculi” … ?                                  

Right, that’s latin for “little person”…

you’d actually be like a little man sitting in a theatre, looking at all your sensations, and trying to make sense of them

You’re making me regret not having done latin and greek now … 😅

but isn’t that the position he criticizes?

Yes, but he changes it around a bit.

If the actual “you” would be like a little person in your head, wouldn’t this “little person” need one of their own?

Right, an infinite regress of observes within observers that in the end fail to explain anything about consciousness

Indeed, then he came up with the idea of a whole bunch of “homunculi” that do really simple stuff, like detect lines or colors, 

then some combining those into simple shapes, like “read triangle”, and further down the line complex shapes, like “a rose” 🌹 

And that sounds a bit weird, but then he links that to neural machinery, and it becomes almost trivial … 😊

But he means it like a kind of mental software running on the neural hardware, it is not exactly like the identity theory

No, that’s right, you explain that very clearly in the paper 📄Someone like that would argue that you can run the same software on many different types of hardware

Yes, so that would account for neurodiversity? Right?

I’m quite tempted to say yes, it does sound very convincing, but then he wants to run it on computers too …

You think that can’t be done?

Well, I’m no programmer, but at least nowadays I don’t think we have computers that are big enough or fast enough.

So, … maybe?🤔

Do you think there is something special about the brain itself that allows us to think and be conscious?

Ah! I can see where you are going with this. That’s Searle’s theory, right?

Right!

I’ll have to think about it a bit more …🧐