I have written two posts on this, one in which I reject simulation because it contains the false idea that consciousness can be introduced into any entity. A second that describes our universe as the work of an experimenter, with the sole purpose of curbing our arrogance.
https://medium.com/p/b2709f6c48bc
https://medium.com/p/3b0eb3e66048

Everyone can interpret the world as they wish. I am presenting a point of view here that you can share or not. If you see it differently, that's OK.
If you want to understand my point of view (but you don't have to), it's best to read my epistemological article. There you will see that there are four levels of knowledge and it depends on which one you want to argue on: https://www.dr-stegemann.de/erkenntnistheorie-anthropischer-relativismus/genetisch-relativistische-erkenntnistheorie/
It is in German, but you can have it translated without any problem. It will also appear soon on my medium.com account: https://medium.com/@drwolfgangstegemann

As I have already said, we make an ontology out of the phenomenology of the world. Some people then believe that this is identical with an objective truth in the transcendent sense. For me, this idea is naive. Classical and quantum physics are therefore two ontologies that we have made out of two different phenomenologies.

If we now argue from our operational level of knowledge, it seems as if the microworld is fundamental. But this statement can only be understood relativistically.

Ultimately, we only transform the world into a modality that suits us. In our case, this is a neuronal one. In the case of a photon, it would be a photonic one. And that would look completely different to ours.

Whether it is an ontological emergence depends on us, because it is we who epistemically construct the world.
But regardless of that, it seems that this fine carpet of matter is fundamental at the smallest level and everything macroscopic 'unravels', but then evolves according to its own rules and acts deterministically (gravity through planets).
In any case, we will not be able to describe classical and quantum physics with the same terms and theories.

I'm out...

I don't know what you're getting at (I haven't read everything). Of course, consciousness is our window to the world and therefore the most important thing. But a theory of consciousness has to integrate everything, including the 1st and 3rd person perspective, otherwise you can't measure anything. Both perspectives are usually correlated in studies.

Something general: The brain and our consciousness are so complex things that I believe you have to study the entire spectrum intensively for years in order to be able to make reasonably meaningful statements. I know that philosophy often leads you to spontaneously develop plausible thoughts. But that usually leads to pure speculation. I have discussed the methodic and methodological errors that can be made in this portal, but also on my medium page.

A theory of consciousness should include as many aspects, levels and perspectives as possible, including the 1st and 3rd person. If we do not take the 3rd person into account, we will not receive any empirical data about the brain and will not be able to correlate it with behavior or experience.
It is extremely difficult to combine the many aspects due to the complexity.
I think it is important, however, not to derive consciousness causally, because it already exists. So we 'only' have to find the mechanisms that maintain it.
On AI: How should a machine become conscious? Consciousness means (from the 1st person perspective) sensations that arise through sensors and the nerves to the brain and the projection onto the body via the neuroendocrine system. I think it is almost impossible to recreate this, at least in the next few decades. We should not be too impressed by LLMs. They have nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness.

Think logically: if they were stimulus-response machines, who would monitor the sensors? A homunculus, perhaps? The whole thing is self-organized. There is no red alarm light that lights up in case of danger. Life has to do everything itself. So it senses everything that is there inside and outside.
You have to distance yourself from yourself and your oh-so-fascinating experience, otherwise it will be difficult to understand it.

Suppose you know nothing about consciousness, but you examine a human organism and find that there are sensors and nerves. Do you then ask yourself what this is good for? The answer will be that it must have a function. Perhaps you then think that it is there so that these beings can sense what they are doing. So that they are not eaten in the next moment. Sensing is nothing other than consciousness. In our case, this has now become more differentiated, so that we experience entire dramas. This does not change the principle.

Imagine a fluid or graphene intelligence, how would they conceptualize the world? And who would be right, them or us? This inevitably leads to an epistemic relativism.
This states that we can recognize the world within our modality, but not in its 'objective' modality. For this we would need a 'neutral' observer from outside - something like God, who could recognize all subjective worlds.
Instrumentally we could therefore recognize the world step by step, but not epistemologically.

I think you have to differentiate between pure logic and linguistic logic. The liar paradox is a linguistic construct - nothing more.

Western thinking - of course it exists - has so clogged up people's brains that it takes an immense epistemological effort to rise from the frog's perspective and build up the maximum distance in order to understand these things.
The power of the factual is immense and prevents us from taking on other perspectives. It also prevents you from wanting to take on different perspectives and from wanting to learn. People resist any epistemological change. That is more than understandable.

Maybe read my post here (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14959/epistemology-anthropic-relativism) then you will understand my epistemological position.
Furthermore, I assume that we are the ones who interpret the world using our neural means. So there is no 'objective' ontology.
The ontology that we are able to construct leads to the classical physics of the mesocosm. The microworld is 'too small' for us to be able to construct an ontology that is adequate for us.
Both classical and quantum phasic are constructions. In classical physics it takes the form of an ontology; in quantum physics it remains phenomenology.

The transfer of the quantum world to the mesoworld meant philosophy, not technology, example structural realism. Please read carefully!

If you just label my arguments but don't address them further, further discussion makes no sense.

I argue purely logically by saying that we are neuronally established in this world and act here exclusively in this modality. That means we sit in this neural bubble. There is nothing else for us, otherwise we could perhaps switch back and forth between two or more modalities.
If there is no other 'world' for us, then there is nothing behind this world of ours, so there is no meta-physics.
I understand that this argument destroys all dreams of a better, otherworldly world.

I base myself on the fact that we are transforming the world and therefore there cannot be another (for us).
For me, metaphysics is that other world 1 that does not exist for us and therefore there is and cannot be any metaphysics. We have to come to terms with the fact that we can only ever act neurally instantiated, so that every argument is ultimately always tautological. The only question is, can you justify it or just assert it?

I provide an explanation for the fact that metaphysics does not exist

Not at all, while others say that one can know the world or not, I provide a justification, and that is: Every existent is instantiated in the world with its modality and interacts with it by means of this modality.

I only used the photon example to illustrate how relative our existence is. Panpsychism is completely far from my mind.
You have probably understood that World 1 is only an auxiliary mental construct. World 1 as such does not exist (for us).
What I mean to say is that what we call cognition refers to this bubble in which we live as neural beings. Flammarion's wood engraving symbolizes this bubble, from which we cannot escape.
What is the consequence of my epistemology? Instrumentalism, constructivism, genetic epistemology and rejection of everything esoteric and religious. Long live the bubble and we should take care of it.

"...whatever exists must accommodate both minds and brains..."
No, that is exactly the dualism that we cannot get out of our thinking. The brain and the mind are not both up there in the head. Depending on who examines it, they call it a brain or a mind. Both together don't work.

You can investigate anything scientifically. But you cannot scientifically answer questions that are asked incorrectly.
Many believe that one can combine the first and third person perspectives of consciousness simply because they are the same term, consciousness. But both have nothing to do with each other, they are completely different levels.
You cannot objectify qualia, therefore you cannot examine them scientifically.
The phenomenologists can't do it either, they just don't know it yet. :wink:

Read my article here: https://medium.com/neo-cybernetics/cars-and-technology-or-the-mind-body-problem-7ec2b50748c2
Maybe then you'll understand better what I mean.

I would explain it like this: in a universe full of matter, which is described using physics, a special form has emerged. To describe this requires a specific discipline.
Imagine you have a large machine that you describe using mechanics. There is a tiny clockwork in this machine. For this you need precision mechanics. Both are based on the same laws of nature. But you couldn't describe this tiny clock using 'rough mechanics'. The example is not accurate, because life means that there is an active agent that physics cannot represent. It has no concepts for it.

For Laszlo the system exists; he does not distinguish between living and inanimate nature. For me, this is a difference that unfortunately is not made in science and philosophy, at least not ontologically and therefore methodologically. You cannot use physics to explain the special case of 'life'. This requires a special perspective, namely that of biology or better: metabiology.

Just as life is a special case of matter, metabiology is a special case of metaphysics.

I have developed my own approach over the years, the best place to look is on my website: dr-stegemann.de
You can have it translated.
I see the difference between biology and metabiology in the fact that biology as an individual science has a direct angle, metabiology (based on the term metaphysics) has a more general one. I deliberately used the term metabiology of mind to make it clear that metaphysics is not sufficient to explain the specificity of all living things and especially of consciousness. After all, it is not physics that describes life, but biology. And there is only one brain and it is organic and not spiritual.

So you mean you have a brain and there's still a mind in there? Even Descartes couldn't find it.
Or do you think there are two descriptions of the same thing, one physiological and one psychological (or philosophical). In any case, I only have one brain and there's nothing extra in it.
If you talk about two levels of description, be advised that you cannot establish a causal relationship between the two, that is nonsensical. Unfortunately, philosophy has been doing this for two and a half thousand years. It is an apparent dualism that does not exist in reality. One must not confuse description and reality. There is no causality between physiology and psychology. I won't discuss this any further here.

I have problems with terms like "nature as a programmer" or "meaning", "information" or "software". We must not make the mistake of ontologizing our concepts as if they were properties of nature. They are just labels.
My concept of adaptive random walk sounds very similar. And: I distance myself from the four E's (enactivism, embeddedness, embodiment, extended mind), solely because of a very unclean methodology.
I try not to impose my concepts on nature, but to model them conceptually.
But thanks for the link.
Overall, I have similar ideas, including Chaitin and the others mentioned.

I think Pattee is connecting conceptual worlds here that have nothing to do with each other. When we speak of the genetic code, we mean that nature has developed a system from which certain things emerge. Because we don't know exactly what's going on, we call it code. It is not really a code in the information-theoretic sense, because there is neither a sender nor a receiver.
It is completely different in the cultural area. There, for example, a certain social meaning is encoded in the four letters of the word love. There is a sender here, namely society, and a receiver, namely the individual.
In my opinion, Pattee makes the mistake of assigning human concepts to nature. Nature knows no meanings and therefore no semiotics. Nor does it know any information, by the way. Therefore, when I use the term information, I always add that it is actually structure. Because the term information leads to the same misunderstandings as those contained in the term biosemiotics.

The question that can be asked of biological life is why does life move on its own and why does it do so in a structured manner.
Two possible answers are conceivable, each of which can be assigned to an epistemic-methodological direction:
1. The complexity of life is simply the assemblage of elements working together according to physical rules. Your collaboration is always traceable back to the individual elements. The fact that life behaves 'sensibly' in the sense that it is capable of surviving is due to the selection of random mutations.
2. Individual elements combine to form complex structures that each work differently than is justified by the properties of the individual elements. Each level of complexity yields new traits after passing through regime-changing tipping points. While physical laws are sufficient to describe 1., new categories are needed to describe 2., namely biological and biological laws that are not already expressed by physical laws.
If, for example, thermodynamics is used to describe physical processes, it must be transformed into biological categories for 2. Example: a trajectory is then not a point towards which the physical system runs, but the point itself is a biological reaction center with high information density (in the sense of structure density) that is constantly changing.
To what extent a description with physical terms makes sense here, even if they have been transformed, remains to be seen. In any case, they are no longer the original terms of thermodynamics.

With his dissipative structures, Prigogine further developed thermodynamics and formulated an ontological principle. But if you want to understand life 'from the inside', this is not enough. Thermodynamics does not explain that autocatalytic process, nor does it explain the steering and control instance that life implies.
Dead matter is passive, living matter is active. This is something completely different. The question of why I don't go for a walk but read a book can only be described with thermodynamics on a very general and abstract level that doesn't really understand the specifics.

Thermodynamics is a concept in physics. However, physics is not suitable for describing living systems. Because life follows other organizational principles than inanimate nature. Life is self-sustaining through autocatalysis.
Physical descriptions, even if intended ontologically, do not capture the specificity of life.
And it's not just about self-organization, but about how this is 'controlled'. The structural density I'm talking about is, so to speak, the inner core of life. Various attributes are ascribed to it, soul, I, spirit or - as I said - (free) will.

It's always the same nonsensical questions because one tends to ontologize the own phenomenology. That is unscientific. If you want to know why we experience something, ask evolution. It will tell you that we experience something because it serves the orientation of living beings in their environment - like a navigation system. So it's not a mystery, it's just reality.
It's only mystical because it's us who experience something. And that quickly leads us to the idea that such a great experience must contain something mysterious, something metaphysical. But it doesn't. It is nothing more than an art-specific excitability of nerves that converge into a central nervous system.

sorry, ich sollte den Übersetzer nicht verwenden.

The west is stupid as bean straw. In 2014, the Maidan riots are escalated, conscious of the fact that the Crimea for Russia is of central strategic importance.
Today China is warned to deliver arms to Russia, but you deliver weapons to Ukraine yourself. Stupidity has always been dangerous and led to a world war every time.

very easy, consciousness ist no physical but a philosophical category.

One should consider the term reductionism in a differentiated way. Those who cannot imagine the mundane physiological activity producing consciousness, or seek some intermediate step, are quick to speak of reductionism. Such nonsensical themes as the serious problem of consciousness then arise from the rejection of it.

Now what is reductionism? This is legitimate in physics, because there you can always (at least mentally) reduce complexities to their individual parts.
Very different from all living things. This can only be explained as a structure, so from the outset it is not just more than the sum of its parts, it is something completely different from the sum. Central nervous systems are very different from protein synthesis. The term strong emergence is actually still too weak for this.

Emergence is not only a higher quantity, complexity or sophistication, but it brings new principles into play.
However, life is already emergent insofar as it can only be called life as a combination of individual parts and functions as such.

However, physics has no suitable categories for life that could explain the movement, change and development of a self-active system with its own will.
Here people like to ask whether physics should not have any justification in relation to life. Of course it has, but not by being able to explain the structure called life, but by exploring the relationships between the individual parts (biophysics).

That is, the question of how physiology creates consciousness is not a physical one.
And the question of how a single individual being feels, certainly not.

Read my post https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13876/mind-body-problem/p1 then you will know what I mean (or not).:zwinkern: