[dwb]

I disagree that it’s conceivable that a computer could somehow exist without a conscious maker. It’s so unlikely that it may as well be impossible. If something non-human that was capable of consciousness did form in the universe, through known biology or not, it would “just” be another form of life, and not what the paper is talking about.

What you say about buildings is sort of true as far as it goes, but irrelevant for the argument because buildings aren’t symbolic manipulation machines that only mean something via conscious interpretation, that some people are claiming could gain consciousness themselves.

[tsimionescu]

Probability of such a structure forming is completely irrelevant. The argument makes sense if there was a mathematical/physical impossibility, but as long as the laws of physics allow such an object to exist and form by random chance, and predict it would operate exactly the same as the consciousness-designed one, I don't see any reason to discount it.

I also think the arguments against this are contradictory. On the one hand, we have an argument that says that computers only work because a consciousness built them to implement a particular computation. On the other hand, we're saying that the same physical computer doing the same physical thing can be interpreted to be implementing an infinite number of different computations. These two seem to point in different directions to me.