Presents the author’s view of the best current positions on certain core philosophical and psychological problems. These positions together suggest a skeptical or nihilist perspective modified by evolutionary psychology and contemporary philosophy that embraces our desire to live as best we can and the relative and psychological reality of values, free will and other phenomena while recognizing limitations on their foundations and our understanding. Readers may want to start with the first entry. - Marc Krellenstein (personal info here)
If the brain alone produces consciousness then it seems possible that an artificial machine could be built that would be conscious. In this view we are ourselves just such a machine. Based on what we understand about the brain as an information processing engine it’s reasonable to believe that a computer with the rights sorts of inputs and outputs from and to the real world, and possibly made of the right materials, could power the brain part of a conscious machine. Arguments that a particular limitation of computers makes it impossible for such a machine to be built can’t always be conclusively refuted but are not really relevant, since we can’t see how the physiology of the brain could produce consciousness and could produce similar arguments showing it to be impossible, though in the case of the human brain we have the brute fact that it happens. If it turns out we are never able to understand how that happens for a brain then we may never be able to know how to construct such a conscious machine (except, perhaps, as an indirect or accidental consequence of some construction), but that will not make it any less possible in principle.