[deafcalculus]

Consciousness is likely just a whole bunch of computation.

I suspect "What is consciousness?" will go the way of "What is life?". We more or less understand things that make up a bacteria. Those components aren't alive although the bacteria is. So, it's just a matter of definition.

[RivieraKid]

Couldn't disagree more.

Consciousness is misunderstood by surprisingly large number of smart people. The common view is that there's science and that's it, when actually, science just describes the patterns of what we observe via consciousness, which is in a way above science.

Regarding "what is life?", that's fundamentally different. Life can have fairly concrete definitions. Basically, it's a physical matter with specific properties, that's it. Whereas with consciousness, it's much more complicated. But defining, say, the feeling of pain as a physical matter with specific properties doesn't make much sense. "Pain is when these neurons are charged."

Also, what is a computation? A falling rock does perform a computation of a physical process. Any physical system can be said to perform a computation - or even a myriad of different computations, depending on how the physical state is interpreted.

[mbrock]

What do you mean by computation? What's an example of something that isn't computation?

[deafcalculus]

In this context, I intended it to mean a combination of addition, multiplication, and a small set of relatively simple non-linear functions.

[RivieraKid]

That means you can create consciousness by simulating a Turing machine with pen and paper, or by positioning sand systematically. You can encode its memory in different ways by giving different meaning to different positioning of sand. So randomly throwing sand around could create a Turing computation of consciousness (and all kinds of feelings) with the right choice of encoding.