| When you replace "I" with "it" (as in your example with computers) the question becomes meaningless and stupid. As an outside observer both computers are the same, as they act exactly the same way, therefore there is no question. That is actually the "egalitarian" view in Benj Hellie's paper [1]: > The ‘god’s eye’ point of view taken in setting up the egalitarian metaphysics does not correspond to my ‘embedded’ point of view ‘from here’, staring out at a certain computer screen. The vertiginous question (or Nagel's Hard Problem [2] to a degree: Why does physical brain activity produce a first-person perspective at all?) is about the subjectivity of consciousness. I see the world through my eyes, therefore there is only one "I" while there are infinitely many others. The duplication example was something I made up to explain the concept, but to reiterate, if I could make a perfect copy of me, why would I still see the world from the first copy's eyes and not the second, if the physical structure of the brain defines "me"? What stops my consciousness from migrating from the first body to the second, or both bodies from having the same consciousness? Again, this question is meaningless when we are talking about others. It is a "why am I me" question and cannot be rephrased as "why person X is not person Y". Obviously we don't have the capacity to replicate ourselves, but I, as a conscious being, instinctively know (or think) that I am always unique, regardless of how many exact copies I make. As I mentioned in another comment, I don't have a formal education on philosophy, so I am probably doing a terrible job trying to explain it. This question really makes sense when it clicks, so I suggest you to read it from a more qualified person's explanation. [1] http://individual.utoronto.ca/benj/ae.pdf [2] https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf |
We might ask "what else do we expect it to do?" A second person perspective makes even less sense. And since the brain's activity entails first-person-perspective-like processing, the next most obvious answer, no perspective at all, isn't plausible either. It's reasonable that the brain would produce a first person perspective as it thinks about its situation. (And you don't have extend this to objects that don't think, by the way, if you were thinking of doing that.)
But I'm still left with the impression that there's an unanswered question which this one was only standing in for. The question is probably "what is thinking, anyway?".
Or, something quite different: "Why don't I have the outside observer point of view?". It's somehow difficult to accept that when there are many points of view scattered across space (and time), you have a specific one, and don't have all of them: "why am I not omniscient?". It's egotistical to expect not to have a specific viewpoint, and yet it seems arbitrary (and thus inexplicable) that you do have one. But again, the real question is not "why is this so?" but "why does this seem like a problem?".