I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and I don’t know which of them are confused.
Here’s a way to make the statement “consciousness is computation” a little less vague, let’s call the new version X: “you can simulate a human brain on a fast enough computer, and the simulation will be conscious in the same sense that regular humans are, whatever that means”. I’m not completely sure if X is meaningful, but I assign about 80% probability to its being meaningful and true, because current scientific consensus says individual neurons operate in the classical regime, they’re too large for quantum effects to be significant.
But even if X turns out to be meaningful and true, I will still have leftover object-level questions about consciousness. In particular, knowing that X is true won’t help me solve anthropic problems until I learn more about the laws that govern multiple instantiations of isomorphic conscious thingies, whatever that means. Consciousness could “be” one instantiated computation, or an equivalence class of computations, or an equivalence class plus probability-measure, or something even more weird. I don’t believe we can enumerate all the possibilities today, much less choose one.
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and I don’t know which of them are confused.
Here’s a way to make the statement “consciousness is computation” a little less vague, let’s call the new version X: “you can simulate a human brain on a fast enough computer, and the simulation will be conscious in the same sense that regular humans are, whatever that means”. I’m not completely sure if X is meaningful, but I assign about 80% probability to its being meaningful and true, because current scientific consensus says individual neurons operate in the classical regime, they’re too large for quantum effects to be significant.
But even if X turns out to be meaningful and true, I will still have leftover object-level questions about consciousness. In particular, knowing that X is true won’t help me solve anthropic problems until I learn more about the laws that govern multiple instantiations of isomorphic conscious thingies, whatever that means. Consciousness could “be” one instantiated computation, or an equivalence class of computations, or an equivalence class plus probability-measure, or something even more weird. I don’t believe we can enumerate all the possibilities today, much less choose one.