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:

Just because we do not fully know how the brain produces consciousness and ixperiencitness does not mean it does not. There are alternative theories but they do not explain how consciousness is produced either. Adding supernatural entities souls, spirits, mind substances, etc., just adds to the complexity of a theory without explaining why there is a need for such a complex brain.

Other ways to state the hard problem of consciousness are: How do physipaths produce awarepaths and ixpepaths? How do physapaths produce awarepaths and ixpepaths?

It doesn’t matter how so much as it matters if they do when it comes to producing conscious life after death for a person.

AI writes: “Critics argue that no amount of physical description can capture the "what it's like" aspect of being conscious.” Whether you have a physical description of how physapaths produce consciousness and ixperiencitness or not, is this necessary knowledge to have when physapaths, awarepaths, and ixperiencitness are produced and reproduced naturally. The science of superimmortality predict that there are many different physapaths that will produce many different awarepaths that you will experience when created. When nature produces one of these different physapaths it doesn't matter if it can be represented as a “physical description” or not, a consciousness that you experience will still exist or exist again.

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

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

The science of superimmortality predict that identical and nearly identical physapaths produce identical awarepaths and ixpepaths. It also predicts that there are many different physapaths that produce different awarepaths that a person will experience when they are created. This means thatthere are many different awarepaths that have the same ixperiencitness. If your body is producing a consciousness that you experience that means that you are not a “Philosophical Zombies” (a body that seems like it is consciousness but is not).

If there actually can be p-zombies this means that sometimes there will be exactly identical physapaths or nearly identical physapaths that do not produce any consciousness. Of course, if the original physapath does not produce consciousness the assumption is that the duplicate physapath will not either. There are obviously many structured and functioning things that do not produce consciousness like your tv.

We can start with any body that is producing consciousness and ixperiencitness and make an identical or near identical structured and functioning copy of it. If a p-zombies exists then the copy might not produce any consciousness.

If p-zombies exist the science of superimmortality original prediction can be changed to identical and nearly identical physapaths often produce identical awarepaths and ixpepaths and sometimes produce bodies that do not produce any consciousness. It could be that an identical or near identical structured and functioning copy of a p-zombie produces a consciousness producing body. It also could be that some p-zombies are only part time unable to produce consciousness.

P-zombies may or may not exist. The extent that they exist effects how easy it is to produce cases of conscious life after death for a person. For example, if p-zombie are created 50% of the time then it takes 50% more duplicates to create the same amount of superimmortality for a person. The awaretheory prediction is still useful as long as there is a percentage chance of producing another body that produces a consciousness that you experience.

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

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

The supporting evidence for the proposal that idetical structure and functioning of a body produces identical consciousness and ixperiencitness is that identical and near identical structure and functioning in two or more differnt bodies produces identical behavior in those bodies even if the bodies are in different places and times and made of different matter. The process which the bodies can be produce identical structure and functioning does not matter either. What matter is that they continue to hve the same structure and functioning The physical behavior of a body alone does not give a exact picture of the consciousness or ixperiencitness produced by the body. Further information is gathered by running experiments on the different cidentireplicas. For instanc, a person can be asked about his conscious experiences, what he know who he thinks he is etc. This gives a better idea about the consciousness that the person is consciously experiencing.

If we were to guess what an identical or nearly identical structured and functioning conscious body would produce with the information that we know that one produced a specific consciousness and ixperiencitness the rational prediction would be predictioning in the other that it would be producing identical consciousness and ixperiencitness This is especially the case when the observed behavior is the identical

To predict that two or more conscious bodies that have identical or near identical structure and functioning are producing a different consciousnesses and ixperiencitnesses requires a more complex theory that need to be coherent with the evidence.

To accept that two different conscious bodies producing identical or near identical structure and functioning have identical consciousnesses but not identical ixperiencitness (subjective experience) seems to imply that consciousness is not the same as subjective experience. It is simpler and more useful to say that at least part of consciousness is subjective experience so when you duplicate consciousness you automatically duplicate the ixperiencitness produced by the body as well.

It can be argued that while the consciousness a person experiences over time or even over each awaremoment changes, the ixperiencitness stays the same over at least part of a person’s life. If your current body produces a different ixperiencitness than it did yesterday, by the definition of ixperiencitness, you no longer consciously exist. In this case you are the same body but the yesterday’s “self” is not experiencing the consciousness the body is producing today.

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.