What rebuttal? All I saw was a string of unsupported assertions.
I have some doubt that either you or HK has read these pieces. Of course, I would be delighted to be proved in error on this score.
Oh, I read it, and with all the attention it deserved.
I spend most of my time doing science, I know science, and what you posted ain't science. If you want to read some science, pick up a copy of Nature or Science. The conventional chest beating from creationists about how this sort of obscurantist claptrap is going to replace nasty old materialist science is the equivalent of herbal medicine or putting razor-blades under paper pyramids.
We will know what consciousness is when we've done sufficiently clever experiments to figure it out, coupled with sufficiently sophisticated models to simulate the behavior. The fascination of creationists with consciousness I attibute largely to heir usual tactic of argumentum ad ignorantem; as long as we don't have many facts, you can construct all sorts of fanciful schemes and not run into any actual fallacies. They tried this with the bacterial flagellum; unfortunately, the necessary supply of ignorance about the flagellum is already running short. I must say consciousness and the human brain is a wiser choice; you may be able to get by with twenty or even fifty years of this sort of thing. Enjoy. Meanwhile, I'll live by what I preach to my students; I don't theorize in advance of the data.
I haven't seen anything but unsupported assertions either.
Well I read the entire post (for which I deserve a medal), and some of the links (which I got through by pretending they were a newly discovered works of Mark Twain).
I confess, I did not read everything. (Because I have every intention of maintaining my sanity.)
When someone writes, "3 plus 4 actually equals 17," then provides a long treatise to prove it, I do not need to read his treatise to know he's wrong. Science is the study of that material existence we are conscious of. Consciousness is not material existence. It is not an emergent quality of matter. These folks do not know which direction they are coming from. Is consciousness something other than material existence? If it is, how does one discover what it is my creating an artificial "material" form of it, such as AI. From the beginning, the very nature of life is misunderstood by these guys. Why do I need to read any more.
There are certainly problems with science, and one of the main problems is the shift from the study of the nature of material existence, to the new versions which attempt to include or incorporate concepts totally unrelated to material existence. What people like Kafatos, Drãgãnescu, and Grandpierre are doing is not a solution to the problem, but an exacerbation of it by the introduction of mysticism in a field that can make no progress except when it is totally objective.
As for no points in my, "rebuttal," my description of the nature of life alone is more cogent than anything in your post. If you think there is something wrong with my argument about the nature of life, please address that. It is short, and succinct. A method never used by those practicing junk science.
Hank