If all science must be in theory falsifiable, and evolution is good science, can you give me some parameters or predictions that if they were found to be true would hurt the theory of evolution?

What would scientists need to find in the future that would seriously do damage to the theory?

With the development of the computer it became painfully obvious that human beings were fundamentally different from any designed piece of technology.

Evidence-based Citation needed. ( From a neurologist or computer scientist. Nothing about how our own massively parallel architecture differs from the Von Neumann architecture.)

The more we understand of the workings of the brain, the more we can mimic it on a computer. ("Ha, but these are simple tasks! Not difficult tasks like consciousness." How convenient of you to have chosen a metric you can't even define to judge progress towards full understanding of the human brain)

there is no rational model as to how to make that machine 'conscious'.

And there was no such model before the development of computers either.

Your unstated assumption seems to be that it is rational to expect a quick development of a "model of consciousness" (whatever that is) after the invention of the computer. If that were so, you might have a point, but, again : evidence needed.

Secondly, our faculty of reason itself does not even work in the same way a computer works.

Evidence-based Citation needed.

Our brain runs on physics. Although there may be various as-of-yet unknown algorithms running in our brain, there is no reason to assume anything non-computational is going on.

Will you change your mind if/when whole brain emulation becomes feasible ?

"You can't explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury" is a hit against Newton's theory of gravity.

"You can't explain "zoink", and I can't tell you what "zoink" is, nor what an explanation of "zoink" would look like" is not a hit against anything.

Also, arguments are not soldiers, and talking about "hits" and "sides" is unwise.

There have, in history, been many occasions where something was not understood. When temperature was not understood, it was still possible to explain to someone what this ill-understood "temperature" was. Specifically, it is simple to make sure that your notion of "colour" or "temperature" is similar to my notion of "colour" or "temperature" even if I don't understand what "colour" and "temperature" are.

I predict that there has never been a concept that

• was not understood at some point in time

• was "not easily explicable" in the sense that "the subjective experience of pain" is not easily explicable

• later turned out to be well-defined and to "cut reality at its joints"

If you can come up with an example of such a concept, I will start taking arguments from vague not-easily-explicable concepts far more seriously.

On the other hand, there are at least some concepts that

• were not understood at some point in time

• were "not easily explicable" in the sense that "the subjective experience of pain" is not easily explicable

• turned out to be completely bogus

namely, the concepts of "soul", "god", etc...

Not react to pain as if it did feel pain, but to actually feel pain in the same sense as a human does?

Do you know how to distinguish "actually feeling pain" from "acting as if" it feels pain?

If so, do tell.

If not, would you perhaps also claim that a machine which passes the Turing test is not "actually" conscious, but merely "acts as if" it is conscious ?

Anti-reductionists are always quick to point at "qualia", "subjective experience", "consciousness" (or the subjective experience of pain, in this case) as examples of Great Big Unexplained Mysteries which have not been/can not be solved by science, but they can never quite explain what exactly the problem is, or what a solution would look like.

Sure, no one does or has ever really had a clue where consciousness comes from. What's your point? The way you're saying "no rational or scientific model" rather than "no model whatsoever" implies you think these are poor tools - do you have some alternative in mind?

It is essentially certain that it is possible in principle to construct out of matter a thing which can feel pain, have an experience of self, etc., to the extent that these are meaningful concepts.

The proof is very simple.

Is there a scientific/mechanical model that would enable a machine to feel pain? Not react to pain as if it did feel pain, but to actually feel pain in the same sense as a human does? The answer is no, there is nothing in science or philosophy that can come up with such a model even in theory, much less using current technology.

And that is only a small part of consciousness. Our abilities to understand and appreciate 'meaning', our vision, imagination, sense of free will....our general human experience of ourselves and our environment cannot be mathematically modeled or completely understood rationally. That makes some rationalists so uncomfortable that they deny the phenomenon of consciousness even exists at all, that its just an illusion. What an amazing conclusion that is!