There are so many materialist views on the materialist/physicalist tradition. I'm an ontological agnostic meaning I'm uncertain what kind of "stuff" exists. Here's a though. Take a super computer, let it know of all particles and in what directions they are going and this machine can then tell you what has happened in the past, present and future. The price you pay for this is freewill. It just seems like we have freewill to do some stuff though.


Roger Penrose believes that we might need to develop a whole new branch of science to deal with the mind/brain.


Daniel Dennet belives that consciousness is an illusion. wtf Dennett. Who wrote your own book is what logically comes next?


Paul Churchland thinks we should use terms such as, my c-fibers are firing up to my brain, which is releasing a chemical, instead of saying "ouch!" He thinks we should use scientific terms, not subjective terms, because he also believes consciousness is an illusion and that science has the correct vocabulary when it comes to the brain.


Here is a great quote by Voltaire if you really want to wow your professor:


It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.


Machines and AI are brutally materialistic. Play a computer in chess and it will demolish anybody. However, does the machine actually know what it's like to play a game, to have so much fun that it never wants the game to end, like so many people never want life to end? Or, is it just dark inside?


Alan Turing invented the rise of computers. he is a genius mathematician with a tragic story. I won't bog you down with that though. He suggested a hypothesis called the Turing machine. He stated that if you have two entities behind a veil and asked them the same questions, and they gave the same responses, then they are both intelligent. Lifting the veil, we see that one is a computer, so what now? Do we have to give it rights or is the intelligence behind it the computer programmers who programmed the rules and all the computer is doing is 10010001111100000.


Do put it in another way. If you make a map, do you say that the map is intelligence or that the person who created the map is intelligent?


Stuff that keeps me up at night.