Consciousness (Human, animal, etc) Can Exist Without a Brain

BradK, thank you for your response. First, I will address your contentions to my arguments. Second, I will address what I perceive as flaws in your arguments. Finally, I will pose some further arguments for my case. As it happens, I am an undergraduate psychology student (with an exam in a few hours so do forgive the rushed tone of this argument but I felt this topic too tempting to leave!) and although I make absolutely no claim to be qualified or an expert in the field, I feel quite comfortable navigating most of the terrain being discussed here. In your opening line, you asked "why?" it is that I believe "we have no good reason to believe consciousness can work without a brain". I explained in my preceding argument that we have no good reason to believe something is the case until it is demonstrated that it is the case. To jump ahead to your concluding paragraph where you challenge me to find a flaw in the statement, " I see no special powers or miracles that are used to create a living brain. The brain may be more advanced than anything we have ever built, but I see no evidence for anything spooky like a "soul" or "the hand of god" being necessary to install consciousness in an arrangement of atoms called a "brain"." my answer will be the same. Of course I will not contend the existence of a soul! Or any other supernatural 'essence'! And this is for *exactly the same reason*. We have no good reason to think that a soul exists because there is no reason to without precedent, in the same way that there is no good reason to think that a mind could exist absent-brain until we have justification for such a position. You went on to say, "...we'll figure out the recipe soon enough." This is the assertion of an opinion, not a factual statement, as you can have no way of proving this. In your paragraph addressing my second point, you essentially grapple with definitions, which I think is an important question to talk about and I don't entirely agree with your statement but I shan't waste too much more time on it. I disagree with your statement "We know what it is we don't know how it works". We currently have neither, but only a nebulous, abstract conception of what it is to be conscious based on personal experience, without a clear understanding or empirical framework. Your remaining arguments take the form of analysing historical and present technological allegories to the functioning of the human brain, which I actually agree are good working models. However, I contend that you have committed a misapplication of them in this context. Alan Turing would certainly have appreciate your allegory pertaining to logical operations, and given the recent news (which you have probably heard about) that a piece of software, Eugene Goostman, controversially passed the Turing test for the first time (1). That system can convince humans that it is animate just over 30% of the time. Although I'm sure you would agree that this does not (yet?) constitute consciousness, it does fall into the ever-approaching field of artificial intelligence. The key point, however, is this: Turing, who predicted the singularity, rise of AI, etc, stipulated that the assessment for such a machine is its ability to render statements and responses indistinguishable from that of a human. It emulates a human. But it is not conscious. Although Alfred Ayer(2) stated that a thing which fails the consciousness test is not conscious, this does not mean that something that passes the test is conscious. Eugene passed the test because its serious of recorded responses was sufficiently believable to pass as a human, but Turing had hypothesised that by 2000 that type of machine wouldn't be articulating prerecorded responses but would be changing over time based on learning algorithms and logical conversation patterns. We haven't developed those yet, we haven't developed any form of conscious machine, and we cannot contend that "Consciousness (Human, animal, etc) Can Exist Without a Brain" without sufficient evidence or precedent; the most prominent AI scientists in the world are developing learning algorithms, which even they assert is not synonymous with the concept of consciousness. The ability to preserve one's mind indefinitely in an artificial 'brain' is alluring and compelling, and gives us hope of transcendence without the need for supernatural intervention. However, like religion, the idea brings comfort and hope to the vulnerable. This alone does not make it true. There is no good reason to believe that mind can exist absent of brain. (1)[http://www.independent.co.uk...] (2)http://en.wikipedia.org...