[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.