[tsimionescu]

All physical processes that we understand are computational. The sun and Earth for example are a computer which is constantly computing the velocity and position of a two-body system (the sun and the earth). Computation is essentially a mechanical process, in the sense that it requires no interpretation, so the question of 'who is the user of a computer' is completely meaningless.

It is disturbing that a philosopher who writes books about these concepts does not understand even this elementary fact about computation. The whole point of developing computer theory was in fact to rid mathematics of the need for human ingenuity, to find simple mechanical rules that can be followed even by a machine to arrive at the same results that a mathematician would.

Related to qualia and the Chinese room experiment and so on, those are arguments about something we perceive, but they do not describe something that we know for sure is fundamental about the world. They may well be descriptions of an illusion we have. You can't assume the existence of qualia as proof that something can't be computational, it mostly goes the other way around: you would have to prove that qualia are real to prove that something can't be computational.