Consciousness is not computation

I think the author is misunderstanding the XKCD comic about rocks [1] (or maybe I am). Just because it's possible to run a simulation of the universe on rocks, doesn't mean that rocks are conscious or turing complete. You can't forget about the person who is manipulating the rocks. The system as a whole is turing complete. Likewise with the bar of iron example that the author gave, you can't forget about the person interpreting the atoms in the bar of iron. The system as a whole is turing complete (and also naturally conscious, because the person doing the interpretation is conscious).

And there is nothing physical necessary to represent such systems. You can simulate turing complete systems inside turing complete systems [2]. So I don't see why consciousness has to be a "physical phenomenon" as the author claims.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/505/

[2]: https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8

"Running a program" is a rather vague expression.

We could excuse philosophers for using such vague expressions because most of them aren't very tech-savvy. For engineers, though, that kind of wording should immediately raise a red flag.

Running a computer program involves many different kinds of things. There's data (state), and there's logic to manipulate said data. There's communication among the various components of the machine, and a whole lot of machinery dedicated to synchronizing said communication because otherwise it all becomes garbage. Any one of these, or a combination of these, could be a candidate for the seat of consciousness.

Philosophers who talk about computation are often preoccupied with the fancy logic gates, and not so much on the mundane circuitry needed to maintain state and synchronize it across components. To me, though, those parts seem much more likely to be analogous to what we call consciousness. Treating consciousness as a kind of state, synchronized across the brain, is the closest way to capture the author's insistence that it is a kind of "unified, integrated whole." Drugs alter consciousness by creating network partitions, inhibiting cache invalidation, corrupting data in flight, etc.

Every chain of reasoning needs to bootstrap with one or more statements that are entirely self-evident, such that they don't need to be justified by reference to other statements. Otherwise you run into an infinite loop.

"I'm a conscious entity" is about as close to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" as modern philosophers are willing to go.

What a confused post.

> The "Chinese Room" argument isn't an argument against consciousness being computation.

This is exactly what it is. Particularly with regard to "thinking," albeit not "consciousness" proper. Though the corollary is that only conscious things can think.

> The man in the room can be said to pass the Turing test, and so can you.

The Turing test is much weaker than the Chinese room experiment. A significant number of chatbots might pass the Turing test, but that has absolutely nothing to do with sentience.