Consciousness: Does the Matter Matter?

This week, I explore the puzzle of why we need special sciences when physics theoretically explains everything. I ask how different scientific disciplines like psychology and economics might discover things that can't be reduced to physics. I raise the controversial question of whether consciousness is more like money (functionally defined and multiply realisable) or more like jade (defined by what it's made of). Could we be overgeneralising from our limited biological understanding of consciousness when we imagine artificial minds might someday be conscious too?

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