It seems to me that the primary question is not whether one could engineer a percipient being, but what perception really is. It is more than a physics-bound process, even if it's physical. It's more than a physics-bound process even if one could engineer it into existence from inorganic material. I don't think the latter is possible at all, but it would be helpful to grant its possibility so as to be able to make the point that even in such a case, reductionism would not be confirmed. Rather, something more than physics-bound processes would be going on where none had been going on before.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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