For the reductionists, talking about empirical support for a theory of consciousness should be as ridiculous as talking about empirical support for the belief that viruses are living.
Not very ridiculous at all? There are definitional choices to be made about viruses after getting deep information about how viruses and other organisms work, but you wouldn’t have crafted the same definitions without that biological knowledge, and you wouldn’t know which definitions applied to viruses without understanding their properties.
Not very ridiculous at all? There are definitional choices to be made about viruses after getting deep information about how viruses and other organisms work, but you wouldn’t have crafted the same definitions without that biological knowledge, and you wouldn’t know which definitions applied to viruses without understanding their properties.
Fine, but it’s still just a definitional choice. Ultimately, after all the scientific evidence comes in, the question seems to come down to morality,
Different ones can seem very different in intuitive appeal depending on how the facts turn out.