Do you consist of matter? Are you conscious? Are you aware the brain is a neural network?
Let's assume the premise that a form of neural network is necessary but insufficient to give rise to conscious experience. Then might it not matter whether the medium is physical or digital?
If you answer this with anything other than "we don't yet know", then you'll be wrong, because you'll be asserting a position beyond what science is able to currently provide; all of this is an open question. But hint: the evidence is mounting that yes, the medium might not matter.
Once you take on an information theoretic view of consciousness, a lot of possibilities and avenues of research open up.
Sorry, my english is not the best and I don't think there is a word for the thing I'm trying to explain. Meaning of 'consciousness' is too messy.
I know brain is a neural network. I just don't understand how cold, hard matter can result in this experience of consciousness we are living right now. The experience. Me. You. Perceiving. Right now.
I'm not talking about the relation between the brain and our conscious experience. It's obvious that brain is collecting and computing data every second for us to live this conscious experience. The very experience of perceiving, being conscious? The thing we take for granted the most, for that we're not without it any time, except when we're asleep?
Matter is what it is. A bunch of carbon and hydrogen atoms. How does the experience arise from matter? It can't. It is a bunch of atoms. I know how NNs and biological neurons work, still I don't see any way matter can do that. There must be some sort of non-matter essence, soul or something like that.
Is a bunch of electrochemical charges this thing/experience I am living right now? How can it be? Is Boltzmann brain [1] a sensible idea at all?
You are referring to qualia [1]: feeling something as-is, subjectively. I had similar metaphysics just a few years ago, but in the end, it's just that: bad metaphysics. And it's not even your or my fault: with 2,400+ years of bad metaphysics it's almost only luck to be able to pierce the veil into the metaphysics of tomorrow.
The main point is that with the tremendous discoveries of people such as Church/Turing (matter can be organized in such a fashion as to produce computation) [2] and those forgotten from the first page of history, such as Harold Saxton Burr (matter can be animated through bioelectricity), we no longer are bound to a static metaphysics where objects are made from a material which just sits there. It was obviously never the case, but fighting the phantasms of our own speculation is the hardest fight.
Therefore, no, matter is neither cold, nor hard, and we are surely very far from comprehending all the uses and forms of matter. Just look at all the wood objects around you and think how the same material was available also to Aristotle, 2,400 years ago, and to Descartes, 400 years ago, when they were writing their bad metaphysics, yet they were completely unable to think 1% of the wood objects you have readily available nowadays, cardboard and toothpicks included.
And also, yes, you are electrochemical charges, we all are, what else could we be? We looked insanely deep into the brain [4], there is no magic going on. A caveat would be that, yes, probably, we are not running on the first layer, at the level of sodium ions and neurotransmitters, but that the machinery, the brain, gives rise to a simulation: "only a simulation can be conscious, not physical systems" [5].
I did not mean qualia, I knew qualia. I meant that my experience is not matter. Matter is matter and charges are charges, my experience right now is neither. Your perception, the act of you experiencing life right now is not matter.
> We looked insanely deep into the brain [4], there is no magic going on.
Indeed all computation and input collection and such happen in the brain. I just don't understand how I can experience anything if I'm composed only of matter. How come there happens to be a mind? Indeed the electrochemical charges from visual receptors in the eye will be transmitted and computed and memory and dopamine and all the neurons will fire regardless of whether I'm only matter or not. But how can the experiencing consciousness, 'me' arise from matter?
> only a simulation can be conscious, not physical systems
This is what I'm talking about, only that I don't see why simulations are not physical systems.
> yes, you are electrochemical charges, we all are, what else could we be?
It's nonsensical and unscientific to completely rule out the possibility that we can be something else as well, especially when we can't study it directly, like in the example of soul.
Simulations are physical systems just as much as running a "Hello World" program on your computer is a physical system: somewhere some transistors flip, but they are not relevant for the level of description we are interested when running the program, the program output, as simple or complex as it could be. Somewhere in the brain some molecules do "stuff", as a result of the "stuff" the brain sustains one agent, or more [1]. How exactly, in an engineering sense, the agent is constructed is yet to be discovered, hopefully we are only a few years, a few decades, away from building synthetic agents.
Sure, we have about 2,700 years of tradition speaking of souls (considering the major religions: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism). Where did those 2,700 years got us? Has any religion been able to build a conscious agent starting from basic materials (whatever they consider basic, pixie dust if they will)? Have all this years speaking of souls managed to achieve something meaningful, even as a side effect, that actually improves the quality of life? I'm talking hay [2], indoor plumbing, hook-and-loop fasteners, ibuprofen, GPS, voltmeters, extreme ultraviolet lithography, things that you and I can use and rely on daily. I have read pretty much all the major texts of the major traditions, from Mahābhārata to Summa Theologiae, call it intellectual curiosity. If not for the "bragging rights" to say that I know what filioque or bodhipakkhiyādhammā means, I would regret it, wasted time and pointless eye strain. So no, it's not nonsensical and unscientific to rule out a not even hypothesis such as the "soul" after 2,700+ years without any kind of results and absolute incompatibility with the way we actually interact with the world, scientifically or not: photons, atoms, electromagnetic fields and the like.
We are composed of matter and we are conscious, we take this as being axiomatic. Given we have one certain example, the question is then how does the body do it, and how could we do it in other substrates: how do we go from "just physics" to mind [1].
The short answer is: chemical reactions start a chain reaction of abstraction towards higher and higher forms of collective intelligence.
For some reason, perhaps something with the way the Hilbert space vector obeying the Schrödinger equation which we usually call "the universe" is [2], but also given the ridiculous breadth and depth of possible explorations of the biological pathways [3], "chunks" of matter tend to group together, they group and form stars and planets, but they also group and form formaldehydes and acetaldehydes and many more. Given enough tries, across multiple environments, in some lucky hydrothermal vents abiogenesis was probably started [4]. Once we had the first agential "chunk" of matter, a group of matter which has a definition of the boundary between a "self", no matter how tiny [5], and an exterior environment, it was more of a game of waiting (~4 billion years) for this tiny agent to grow into an agent with higher-order thinking, self-referentiality, metacognition, and the likes.
Neural networks, as in matrix multiplications, are not conscious because they have no mechanism for deciding what is the environment and what is their own, they are a hammer, sitting there, expecting to be used, not a lacrymaria olor [6], exploring the environment for survival and fun. Could we have neural networks in an agent-like architecture starting to behave more like thermostats, setting goals for themselves? Probably.
Perhaps it's a phenomenon that somehow arises independently ex nihilo from sufficiently complex systems, only ever able to observe, unable to act.
Weird to think about.