How do you know?
Well, for one, you have been unwilling to share any such knowledge. Is it a secret, perhaps?
I see a model that claims to reproduce some of the behaviors of the human mind. Why is that relevant? Where are your subjective experiences in it?
Also, to clarify, when I say "you know nothing", I'm not asking for some complex model or theory, I'm asking for the starting point from which those models and theories were constructed.
prove that it is a stupid question.
Proof is a high bar, and I don't know how to reach it. You could teach me by showing a proof, for example, that "is purple bitter" is a stupid question. Although I suspect that I would find your proof circular.
Well, for one, you have been unwilling to share any such knowledge. Is it a secret, perhaps?
It's very difficult to prove that something is impossible, and you can't do it by noting that it has never happened yet.
Where are your subjective experiences in it?
I was responding to your claim that "there is nothing that you know about consciousness, from which you can derive a more accurate and more material description.". This has been done, so that claim was false. You have shifted the ground.
...that "is purple bitter" is a stupid que
(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!