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 question.
Purple is a colour, bitter is taste, therefore category error.
Proof is a high bar
Then why be so sure about things? Why not say "dunno" to "can robots feel pain?".
This has been done, so that claim was false.
While GWT is a model, it's not a model of the consciousness as you use that word. It's just a model of a human brain and some of the things happening in it. I ask you if it has subjective experiences, because that seems to be the most important aspect of consciousness to you. If you can't find them in this model, then the model is on my side, not yours.
Purple is a colour, bitter is taste, therefore category error.
That's ridiculous. Grapefruit is a fruit, bitter is taste, but somehow "grapefruit is bit...
(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!