Sombyr

Yeah, and the worst is when people are talking about something I know a lot about, getting virtually every detail wrong, and I have to resist saying anything because I know my input will either be ignored, or worse, straight up unwelcome.
Luckily the blessing of being dumb as bricks is that that doesn't happen a lot, but I sure hate when it does.

I suppose I was overly vague about what I meant by "exact copy." I mean all of the knowledge, memories, and an exact map of the state of our neurons at the time of upload being uploaded to a computer, and then the functions being simulated from there. Many people believe that even if we could simulate it so perfectly that it matched a human brain's functions exactly, it still wouldn't be conscious because it's still not a real human brain. That's the point I was arguing against. My argument was that if we could mimic human brain functions closely enough, there's no reason to believe the brain is so special that a simulation could not achieve consciousness too.
And you're right, it may not be conscious in the same way. We have no reason to believe either way that it would or wouldn't be, because the only thing we can actually verify is conscious is ourself. Not humans in general, just you, individually. Therefore, how conscious something is is more of a philosophical debate than a scientific one because we simply cannot test if it's true. We couldn't even test if it was conscious at all, and my point wasn't that it would be, my point is that we have no reason to believe it's possible or impossible.

I see, so your definition of "physical" is "made of particles?" In that case, sorta yeah. Particles behave as waves when unobserved, so you could argue that they no longer qualify as particles, and therefore, by your definition, are not physical. But that kinda misses the point, right? Like, all that means is that the observation may have created the particle, not that the observation created reality, because reality is not all particles. Energy, for instance, is not all particles, but it can be. Quantum fields are not particles, but they can give rise to them. Both those things are clearly real, but they aren't made of particles.
On the second point, that's kinda trespassing out of science territory and into "if a tree falls in the forest" territory. We can't prove that a truly unobserved macroscopic object wouldn't display quantum properties if we just didn't check if it was, but that's kinda a useless thing to think about. It's kinda similar to what our theories are though, in that the best theory we have is that the bigger the object is, the more likely the interaction we call "observation" just happens spontaneously without the need for interaction. Too big, and it's so unlikely in any moment for it not to happen that the chances of the wave function not being collapsed in any given moment is so close to zero there's no meaningful distinction between the actual odds and zero.

There shouldn't be a distinction between quantum and non-quantum objects. That's the mystery. Why can't large objects exhibit quantum properties? Nobody knows, all we know is they don't. We've attempted to figure it out by creating larger and larger objects that still exhibit quantum properties, but we know, at some point, it just stops exhibiting these properties and we don't know why, but it doesn't require an observer to collapse the wave function.
Also, can you define physical for me? It seems we have a misunderstanding here, because I'm defining physical as having a tangible effect on reality. If it wasn't real, it could not interact with reality. It seems you're using a different definition.

A building does not actually enter a superposition when unobserved, nor does Schrodinger's cat. The point of that metaphor was to demonstrate, through humor, the difference between quantum objects and non-quantum objects, by pointing out how ridiculous it would be to think a cat could enter a superposition like a particle. In fact, one of the great mysteries of physics right now is why only quantum objects have that property, and in order to figure that out we have to figure out what interaction "observation" actually is.
Additionally, we can observe the effects of waves quite clearly. We can observe how they interact with things, how they interfere with each other, etc. It is only attempting to view the particle itself that causes it to collapse and become a particle and not a wave. We can view, for instance, the interference pattern of photons of light, behaving like a wave. This proves that the wave is in fact real, because we can see the effects of it. It's only if we try to observe the paths of the individual photons that the pattern changes. We didn't make the photons real, we could already see they were real by their effects on reality. We just collapsed the function, forcing them to take a single path.

I think you're a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It's still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don't understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I'm not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.

On the contrary, it's not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I'm saying we can't be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don't know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It's perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it'd be conscious by default.

We don't even know what consciousness is, let alone if it's technically "real" (as in physical in any way.) It's perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I've heard people argue a machine couldn't feel emotions because it doesn't have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don't actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole "this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function" with a simple statement that said "this happened, change behavior and function," maybe there isn't really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.

My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they're special things that can't be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It's basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.

I agree about BMI often being a bad measurement. Even my own doctors ignore it on me because my BMI is well into the obese range and yet every other measurement of health is in the healthy range, most well into it. My body fat for instance is just below 30%, which is perfectly healthy for a woman. My waist line is well into healthy range as well. Additionally, all my tests such as blood tests come back more than healthy and show that I'm not at risk for any obesity related conditions. Of course, I don't look like the standard "healthy" body most people imagine a woman should have. I would look fat to anyone who doesn't know the full picture.
That's why I always hated that whole thing people say that "If you're BMI is high and you're still healthy it'll be really obvious." People just assume that high BMI and healthy means muscular, when you can have a normal body fat percentage as well as other measurements but still have a high BMI.
This is even ignoring the fact that even when you are genuinely obese and unhealthy, it often stems from body image issues in the first place. The same way a depressed person often goes "I'm doing everything wrong anyway so why bother even trying?" A fat person often is having the struggle of "I'm ugly anyway so why even bother trying to be pretty and healthy? Healthy just means I gotta live longer being ugly." That's why berating people for being fat usually doesn't work. It just makes them feel worse and reinforces that idea they already have that they're too ugly to bother. Sure, some people it might kick into gear to try their best to lose weight to prove they're not ugly, but that's the difference between somebody who still has hope and somebody that's already lost it all.

The most cathartic moment of my entire life was when I encountered that exact thing in a thread from over a decade ago expecting that to be it and lost all hope, only to find somebody replied calling them out and telling them to share their solution or future googlers were gonna be very upset. They posted their solution and it did, indeed, work.
Don't even remember what the issue was, but the wave of relief was amazing enough that I still remember the feeling to this day.

It's true. I get my password wrong all the time.