Actually I still live in Bristol but am employed in Cambridge. I'm usually around one week in three. Next up on 18 Nov, I'll ping you and maybe we can grab a coffee..

And what's so borked about that starting point is that you have no resources at all for explaining consciousness *discourse* — why it exists or how it manages to refer to anything! You might as well pack your bags and go home because the one thing you can't be talking about is consciousness.

Hi Matt. It would be good to see you in Cambridge some time!

I feel like these bimodal distributions crop up quite a lot in human beliefs/preferences (realism vs. instrumentalism in philosophy being another). Almost like competing alleles.

I like the idea of intelligence as being as much about defining problems as solving them. Intelligence as niche construction.

Solid advice Derek. I love criticism, even when painful. Even bad-faith criticism is almost always an opportunity to improve things.

goto DEAD

Mm, brassicas

Finally, some recognition!

Wow. Looking forward!

But evolution has already demonstrated it. It built a conscious machine without relying on any resources (other than a lot of time) that an engineer wouldn't also have access to.

Consciousness isn't something special happening *to* us, it's something special that we can *do*, and so any account has to be functional in nature and any role for the "substrate" can only be in delivering functionality. Difficult to make progress without agreeing on the explandum first.

The problem is that these stories are all a bit mysterian about consciousness itself, i.e. as an explanatory target it is itself mysterious and so it remains an open question whether there is some (correspondingly mysterious) role for biological "substrates" to play.

Evolving a machine (meat or otherwise) is just a one way of engineering one, so conscious organisms provide an existence proof that consciousness can be engineered.

“Biological realisers” are also computational mechanisms, though, so not sure I understand your premise.

And a conscious machine is “just” a machine that thinks it's conscious -- perhaps not something easy to engineer but certainly not a notion that depends on any particular substrate.