What Makes Us Human?

An impromptu closing panel on the question What Makes Us Human?, alongside Kateřina Lesch and Daria Hvížďalová and organised by Jiří Vicherek.

My working answer was consciousness — but perhaps we are not so fundamentally different just because we run on complex neurobiology. Consciousness may be a stranger thing than that: something that could arise from complex operations other than the neurochemical ones. As a physicalist, I can’t claim to know how a matrix on silicon feels when it’s multiplied. To illustrate the potential weirdness, I reached for Schwitzgebel’s classic “If Materialism Is True, Then The United States Is Literally Conscious” — an argument any physicalist trying to account for consciousness has to wrestle with.