I think you’re completely mistaken about what computationalism claims. It’s not that consciousness is a mysterious epiphenomenon of computation-in-general; it’s more that we expect consciousness to be fully reducible to specific algorithms. “Consciousness is really just computation” left at that would be immediately rejected as a mysterious answer, fake causality, attempting to explain away what needs only to be explained, and other related mistakes; ‘computation’ only tells us where we should be looking for an explanation of consciousness, it can’t claim to be one itself.
(But my answers would be: (1) c, irrelevant; (2) that’s not the level of abstraction where you’d be explaining consciousness, any more than you’d talk about Turing machines or register machines in explaining Photoshop; (4) no; (5) I’m leaning toward functions, but with a broad view of what should be considered “input” and “output” — e.g. your internal monologue serves as both; (6)(7) what’s the relevance of a Theory of Everything here? (8) only certain kinds, obviously.)
I think you’re completely mistaken about what computationalism claims. It’s not that consciousness is a mysterious epiphenomenon of computation-in-general; it’s more that we expect consciousness to be fully reducible to specific algorithms. “Consciousness is really just computation” left at that would be immediately rejected as a mysterious answer, fake causality, attempting to explain away what needs only to be explained, and other related mistakes; ‘computation’ only tells us where we should be looking for an explanation of consciousness, it can’t claim to be one itself.
(But my answers would be: (1) c, irrelevant; (2) that’s not the level of abstraction where you’d be explaining consciousness, any more than you’d talk about Turing machines or register machines in explaining Photoshop; (4) no; (5) I’m leaning toward functions, but with a broad view of what should be considered “input” and “output” — e.g. your internal monologue serves as both; (6)(7) what’s the relevance of a Theory of Everything here? (8) only certain kinds, obviously.)