We Are Beast Machines

I take your point, but I disagree: your statement assumes that there are conscious beings who are not my kin (and to be clear, by "kin" I broadly mean animals: living entities that are embodied and show characteristics like intention, mood and emotion). But there isn't any evidence that these exist and there's little if any evidence that they are even possible.

At best, you can put forward a thought experiment that starts with, "Suppose there are beings which are not animals but which are nonetheless conscious." I'm questioning the premise of that thought experiment, however, because so far as we can tell, there is no such thing.

In other words, computers are not conscious because they are not animals.

This may seem like circular reasoning, but not if you take the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of animals as opposed to an emergent property of complex systems.

I don’t know.. consensus reality is what I would call the reality that is portrayed in media or mabye the reality that fits the most nr of people.

Objective reality is best described with particle physics but that stuff can’t be understood by the human mind. The human mind can’t keep track of so much complexity at once.

Extreme selection bias.

For me this is analogous to, say, a PC running a NES emulator.

You can talk about the emulated CPU. Its state: its 8-bit register values, the contents of its 2KB of RAM, what 6502-architecture code it's currently running. Its concept of time: how many clock cycles it spends doing what, at an assumed fixed number of nanoseconds per clock cycle. Its inputs and outputs: controller button presses, video out.

Or you can talk about the PC's CPU. Its 64-bit register values, the contents of its gigabytes of RAM, what x86-architecture code it's currently running. Its own clock cycles, its own inputs and outputs.

Both of those can be considered to exist at the same time.

But of course, the emulated CPU doesn’t have an independent physical existence; it’s just an abstraction that exists within the PC. Its register values and RAM contents are represented by some part of the PC’s register values and RAM contents, with some arbitrary encoding depending on the emulator in use. Its time flows whenever the PC feels like running the emulation. The emulator might be set to 1x real time, or 2x or 0.5x, but even that setting only applies on average; individual clock cycles will always proceed at a highly erratic rate. The emulated CPU’s output might go to a real screen or it might just be saved as a video file. And so on.

But if the CPU isn’t real:

(1) Does that mean it’s a “p-zombie” that is only pretending to run 6502 code, but isn’t really?

(2) Does that mean you’re not really playing Super Mario Bros. if you play on an emulator?

My answer to 1 is: maybe, maybe not, but it makes no difference. Because my answer to 2 is: no, you definitely are playing the same game regardless of whether you’re using an emulator or not. The essence of what it means to “play Super Mario Bros.” is to interact with a system that follows certain rules to map controller inputs to video outputs. The rules are a mathematical abstraction, not inherently connected to any physical object. So it doesn’t matter whether the rules are implemented by a physical CPU or an emulator inside another CPU.

And I see consciousness as basically the same thing. A conscious being, to me, is fundamentally a mathematical abstraction consisting of some state, some inputs and outputs, and rules for manipulating the state and producing outputs from inputs, where the rules have to meet certain standards to count as conscious. For example, the rules should be able to perform general-purpose logical reasoning; they should include some kind of concept of self; etc. The exact boundaries could be litigated, but at minimum the rules corresponding to the operation of the human brain quality.

And a physical brain is really just one possible physical representation of that abstraction. A Chinese room would work too. It would be impossibly slow, and the person would need an astronomical number of filing cabinets to store the necessary data, and they’d inevitably commit calculation errors, but aside from that it would work.

So yes, the Chinese room, or the mathematical process it represents, can have consciousness, while the person within it has their own independent consciousness. Just as a NES CPU can exist “inside” a PC CPU, an emulated brain can exist “inside” a real brain (well, “inside” except for the filing cabinets).

No, there's no such assumption in my statement. That statement is merely open about what we don't know. Conversely, there is an assumption in your reasoning that non-animals are never conscious, which is, well, an assumption, and not derived from facts.

This creates a blind spot where an area of non-knowledge is assumed to be known about, and rejected out of hand. I have to point out that taking the view that consciousness is a property of animals does not exclude non-animals having it.

Even then, there will be a tussle over the exact line of what qualifies as an animal for the purpose of consciousness, resulting in the need to answer the same generalizations (e.g. intention, mood, emotion) that would allow yet undiscovered but plausible forms of life to qualify as conscious.