Laplace’s demon could know the exact future evolution of each neuron in Descartes’s brain without this giving him the slightest information about whether Descartes thought and existed as a conscious subject. In fact, the demon himself would not even know whether computing Descartes’s future evolution would generate the realization of his conscious experience. If the answer were affirmative, only the “simulated Descartes” himself would know it (!), and if it were negative then nobody would. In naturalistic dualism consciousness is the ultimate noumenon.
In fact, the “neural correlates of consciousness” research agenda (Koch, Massimini, Boly and Tononi, 2016) substantially depends on our trust on human subjective reporting. The extension of this methodology to animals is undermined for their lack of language, which limits reporting. On the other hand, for computers, even superhuman cognitive and linguistic skills would be not enough to guarantee conscience, because the specific physical implementation of a neural network (and not only her outputs) is likely important for the emergence of conscience (see Marshall, Albantakis, Mayner, Koch, and Tononi, 2019).
Well, the main problem here is that we don’t know and cant know, for reasons explained here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cFDGyFGhiW3JeCrd4/freedom-under-naturalistic-dualism
Laplace’s demon could know the exact future evolution of each neuron in Descartes’s brain without this giving him the slightest information about whether Descartes thought and existed as a conscious subject. In fact, the demon himself would not even know whether computing Descartes’s future evolution would generate the realization of his conscious experience. If the answer were affirmative, only the “simulated Descartes” himself would know it (!), and if it were negative then nobody would. In naturalistic dualism consciousness is the ultimate noumenon.
In fact, the “neural correlates of consciousness” research agenda (Koch, Massimini, Boly and Tononi, 2016) substantially depends on our trust on human subjective reporting. The extension of this methodology to animals is undermined for their lack of language, which limits reporting. On the other hand, for computers, even superhuman cognitive and linguistic skills would be not enough to guarantee conscience, because the specific physical implementation of a neural network (and not only her outputs) is likely important for the emergence of conscience (see Marshall, Albantakis, Mayner, Koch, and Tononi, 2019).