alt Hacker News>Either all the computation happens "in the dark" [...] or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets
Why exclude the option that only specific kinds of computations are conscious, e.g. recursive control systems?
>Either all the computation happens "in the dark" [...] or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets
Why exclude the option that only specific kinds of computations are conscious, e.g. recursive control systems?
For two reasons:
1. This requires explaining why only some kinds of information processing are privileged to be conscious, which seems rather arbitrary.
2. There's the question of levels of abstraction. Which information processor is conscious? The physical CPU, the zeroth VM, the first VM, the second VM, etc.
3. And there's the question of interpretation. What is computation? A CPU is "just" electrons moving about. Who says the motion of these 10^12 electrons represents arithmetic, or string concatenation, or anything else? The idea of abstract information processing above the bare causality of particles and fields is in itself a kind of dualism (or n-alism, because Turing completeness lets you emulate machines inside machines).