Introduction:

Challenges for awaretheory's "structure and functioning" hypothesis are largely shared with other physicalist or materialist theories of mind. These include philosophical arguments and conceptual difficulties in fully explaining subjective experience through physical processes alone:

==The "Hard Problem" of Consciousness:== A primary challenge is explaining why and how specific brain structures and functions produce subjective, qualitative experience (qualia) at all, rather than just non-conscious information processing. Critics argue that no amount of physical description can capture the "what it's like" aspect of being conscious.

The Knowledge Argument (Mary's Room):

This thought experiment poses a challenge by suggesting that someone (Mary) who knows all the physical facts about color vision would still learn something new upon experiencing color for the first time. This implies that physical facts alone do not constitute the whole truth about consciousness, challenging the sufficiency of the "structure and functioning" hypothesis.

The Conceivability of Philosophical Zombies:

The argument that a being could be a perfect physical and functional replica of a conscious person but lack any inner experience (a philosophical zombie) is a direct challenge to the idea that physical structure and function are sufficient for consciousness.

The "Combination Problem":

While awaretheory is not panpsychism, it still needs to fully account for how consciousness "emerges" from the interaction of billions of individual, non-conscious neurons. Explaining the transition from individual parts to a unified, single conscious experience is a complex problem.

The Nature of Identity and Duplication:

The hypothesis relies on the premise that exact or sufficient duplication of structure and functioning will produce the same consciousness. This raises philosophical questions about personal identity and whether a perfect replica truly has the same, or merely an identical, experience.

Lack of a Complete Scientific Theory:

Currently, there is no complete, universally accepted scientific theory that precisely maps every subjective experience to a specific set of physical structures and functions. Awaretheory proposes that this is possible in principle, but the actual, detailed mechanism remains an active area of research for neuroscience and philosophy alike.

Awaretheory’s response to AI’s "Hard Problem" of Consciousness:

Awaretheory’s response to AI’s The Knowledge Argument (Mary's Room)::

Awaretheory’s response to AI’s The Conceivability of Philosophical Zombies:

Awaretheory’s response to AI’s The "Combination Problem:

Awaretheory’s response to AI’s The Nature of Identity and Duplication:

Awaretheory’s response to AI’s Lack of a Complete Scientific Theory:

Awaretheory is a name for the beginning stage in the process for the development of the science of superimmortality. As a theory is developed, there are, to begin with and then through the whole process, stages of development. There are ideas that seem well suited to solving or explaining the problem, later to be found to be deficient. The original problem that awaretheory decided to work toward understanding was “Can someone consciously exist after the death of their body?”. If yes then how? The starting point is determining what were the specific needed conditions to create the original conscious self to begin with. There have been proposed many different theories that include supernatural entities like souls and gods. Materialist theories were based on the fact that when the body dies there is no evidence that there is any consciousness continuing to be produced by the body. There is also no evidence that this person consciously continues to exist elsewhere. The logical conclusion was to propose there is no conscious life after death.

Obviously, a consciousness appeared to exist when the body was alive and functioning normally. It seemed reasonable to think that if the body was restored to the structure and functioning state it was in before its death it should also produce a continuation of the same consciousness it was producing before death. But what if the structure and functioning was produced instead from a point in the life of the original person any time before death?

No science is complete. Every science goes through a developmental process of trial and error trying to get the pieces of evidence that currently exist to fit into a predictive theory that then can be useful in many different ways. A good scientific theory needs to be as simple as possible but also as predictive as possible.

The statement that identical and near identical structure and functioning of a body produces identical behavior, consciousness, and ixperiencitness predicts an near endless amount of useful information about a very complex topic.

Stated in a more scientific, useful, and predictive way: Identical and near identical physapaths produce identical behaviorpaths, awarepaths and ixpepaths.