It seems to me that the arguments so lucidly presented elsewhere on Less Wrong would say that the machine is conscious whether or not it is run, and indeed whether or not it is built in the first place: if the Turing machine outputs a philosophical paper on the question of consciousness of the same kind that human philosophers write, we’re supposed to take it as conscious.
It is useful to distinguish the properties “a subsystem C of X is conscious in X” and “C exists in a conscious way” (which means that additionally X=reality). I think Nisan expresses that idea in the parent comment.
The machine considered has the property of being conscious in its context X (i.e. X = the system containing the machine, the producers of its input and consumers of its output). The machine exists in a conscious way if additionally X = reality.
It seems to me that the arguments so lucidly presented elsewhere on Less Wrong would say that the machine is conscious whether or not it is run, and indeed whether or not it is built in the first place: if the Turing machine outputs a philosophical paper on the question of consciousness of the same kind that human philosophers write, we’re supposed to take it as conscious.
It is useful to distinguish the properties “a subsystem C of X is conscious in X” and “C exists in a conscious way” (which means that additionally X=reality). I think Nisan expresses that idea in the parent comment.
The machine considered has the property of being conscious in its context X (i.e. X = the system containing the machine, the producers of its input and consumers of its output). The machine exists in a conscious way if additionally X = reality.