There’s a lot we understand about the brain, but there is so much more we dont understand about the brain and “awareness” in general. It may not be magic, but it certainly isnt 100% understood.
I’m not saying we understand the brain perfectly, but everything we learn about it will follow logic and math.
Not neccesarily, there are a number of modern philosiphers and physicists who posit that “experience” is incalculable, and further that it’s directly tied to the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics (Penrose-Hammerof; ORCH-OR). I’m not saying they’re right, but Penrose won a Nobel Prize in quantum mechanics and he says it can’t be explained by math.
I agree experience is incalculable but not because it is some special immaterial substance but because experience just is objective reality from a particular context frame. I can do all the calculations I want on a piece of paper describing the properties of fire, but the paper it’s written on won’t suddenly burst into flames. A description of an object will never converge into a real object, and by no means will descriptions of reality ever become reality itself. The notion that experience is incalculable is just uninteresting. Of course, we can say the same about the wave function. We use it as a tool to predict where we will see real particles. You also cannot compute the real particles from the wave function either because it’s not a real entity but a description of relationships between observations (i.e. experiences) of real things.
We don’t need to understand cognition, nor for it to work the same as machine learning models, to say it’s essentially a statistical model
It’s enough to say that cognition is a black box process that takes sensory inputs to grow and learn, producing outputs like muscle commands.
You can abstract everything down to that level, doesn’t make it any more right.
