The configuration of 90 billion neurons in my brain, when interacting with another brain which asserts that humans have "physical" aspects and "mental" aspects that produce consciousness, or the few other models, does not transition to a configuration that asserts that.
Neither is it compatible with a configuration that represents understanding how the smart humans who espouse such opinions can possibly do so.
For a long time, it was the common thought that there was a little man/demon/something inside our head that was using our senses and thinking for us; it was what we meant when we referred to ourself. The little man was called a homunculus. How that wasn't rejected by the first six year old that heard it, based on the obvious infinite regression problem, is incomprehensible to me. Nonetheless, as we learned more, that idea was tossed on the trash heap.
All of the arguments these people are making about consciousness indirectly boil down to a homunculus. How they can't see that, I don't know.
As Pierre Laplace is apocryphally said to have replied to Napoleon when asked why there was no mention of God in his writings about the world, "I had no need of that hypothesis". All that is needed is to treat consciousness as an emergent behavior of an ungodly number of neurons. They wonder what it means to say "I see a red car". Why, it means that your brain configuration reacted to inputs that it sorted as "car" and "red", and your neural network was reconfigured to indicate that you are again seeing what you've seen in the past. The "I" in that thought need not be ascribed to any process other than that of your neural machinery.
And when you die? You just … stop.
294 words for Brevity Quest 2024