I will revise the post when I get a chance because this is a common interpretation of what I said, which wasn't my intent.   My assertion isn't "if someone or something claims sentience, it must definitely actually be sentient".  Instead we are meant to start with the assumption that the person at the start of the experiment is definitely sentient, and definitely being honest about it.  Then the chain of logic starts from that baseline.

And there are orders of magnitude more detail going on in my body (and even just in my brain) than I perceive, let alone that I communicate.

There are no sentient details going on that you wouldn't perceive.

It doesn't matter if you communicate something, the important part is that you are capable of communicating it, which means that in changes your input/output pattern (if it didn't, you wouldn't be capable of communicating it even in principle).

Circular arguments that "something is discussed, therefore that thing exists"

This isn't the argument in the OP (even though, when reading quickly, I can see how someone could get that impression).

thank you kindly.  I had heard about a general neuron replacement thought experiment before as sort of an open question.  What I was hoping to add here is the specific scenario of this experiment done on someone who begins the experiment as definitively sentient, and they are speaking of their own sentience.  This fills in a few holes and answers a few questions that I think lead us to a conclusion rather than a question

there are certainly a lot of open specific questions - such as - what precisely about the firing patterns is necessary for the emergence of sentience.  

so the idea is that you can describe the brain by treating each neuron as a little black box about which you just know its input/output behavior, and then describe the interactions between those little black boxes. Then, assuming you can implement the input/output behavior of your black boxes with a different substrate (i.e., an artificial neuron)

This is guaranteed, because the universe (and any of its subsets) is computable (that means a classical computer can run software that acts the same way).

As other people have said, this is a known argument; specifically, it’s in The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle in the Physicalism 201 series. From the very early days of LessWrong

Albert: “Suppose I replaced all the neurons in your head with tiny robotic artificial neurons that had the same connections, the same local input-output behavior, and analogous internal state and learning rules.”

I think this proof relies on three assumptions. The first (which you address in the post) is that consciousness must happen within physics. (The opposing view would be substance dualism where consciousness causally acts on physics from the outside.) The second (which you also address in the post) is that consciousness and reports about consciousness aren’t aligned by chance. (The opposing view would be epiphenomenalism, which is also what Eliezer trashes extensively in this sequence.) physical duplicate might do the same, although. that would imply the original's consciousness is epiphenomenal. Which is itself a reason to disbelieve in p-zombies , although not an impossibility proof.

This of course contradicts the Generalised Anti Zombie Principle announced by Eliezer Yudowsky. The original idea was that in a zombie world, it would be incredibly unlikely for an entity's claims of consciousness to be caused by something other than consciousness. "

Excluding coincidence doesn't proved that an entity's reports of consciousness are directly caused by its own consciousness. Robo-Chalmers will claim to be conscious because Chalmers does. It might actually be conscious, as an additional reason, or it might not. The fact that the claim is made does not distinguish the two cases. Yudkowsky makes much of the fact that Robo-Chalmers claim.would be caused indirectly by consciousness -- Chalmers has to be conscious in order to make a computational duplicate of his consciousness -- but at best that refutes the possibility of a zombie world, where entities claim to be conscious, although consciousness has never existed. Robo-Chalmers would still be possible in this world for reasons Yudkowsky accepts. So there is one possible kind of zombie, even given physicalism so the Generalised Anti Zombie Principle is false

(Note that I am talking about computational zombies, or c-zombies, not p-zombies

Computationalism isn't a direct consequence of physicalism. Physicalism has it that an exact atom-by-atom duplicate of a person will be a person and not a zombie, because there is no nonphysical element to go missing. That's the argument against p-zombies. But if actually takes an atom-by-atom duplication to achieve human functioning, then the computational theory of mind will be false, because there CTM implies that the same algorithm running on different hardware will be sufficient. Physicalism doesn't imply computationalism, and arguments against p-zombies don't imply the non existence of c-zombies-duplicates that are identical computationally, but not physically).

@Richard_Kennaway

That sounds like a Chalmers paper. https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

just read his post.  interesting to see someone have the same train of thought starting out, but then choose different aspects to focus on.

Any non-local behaviour by the neurons shouldn't matter if the firing patterns are replicated.  I think focusing on the complexity required by the replacement neurons is missing the bigger picture.  Unless the contention is that the signals that arrive at the motor neurons have been drastically affected by some other processes, enough so that they overrule some long-held understanding of how neurons operate, they are minor details.

"The third assumption is one you don't talk about, which is that switching the substrate without affecting behavior is possible. This assumption does not hold for physical processes in general; if you change the substrate of a plank of wood that's thrown into a fire, you will get a different process. So the assumption is that computation in the brain is substrate-independent"
Well, this isn't the assumption, it's the conclusion (right or wrong).  It appears from what I can tell is that the substrate is the firing patterns themselves.

I haven't delved too deeply into Penrose's stuff for quite some time.  What I read before doesn't seem to explain how quantum effects are going to influence action potential propagation on a behaviour-altering scale.  It seems like throwing a few teaspoons of water at a tidal wave to try to alter its course.



 

The part you're quoting is just that the resulting outward behaviour will be preserved, and is just a baseline fact of deterministic physics.  What I'm trying to prove is that sentience (partially supported by that fact) is fully emergent from the neuron firing patterns.