[tsimionescu]

I think the book example muddied the waters, unfortunately. I agree that the concept "3:00 PM" only exists in the mind of the observer. But I don't agree that this means the clock's mechanism isn't intrinsically, objectively, a time keeping mechanism. The clock is a physical instantiation of a time keeping algorithm, in an objective sense. The meaning of a particular time, or even the interpretation of time, is a subjective human experience, but that doesn't mean that computation is as well. If the clock wasn't a correct instantiation of the time keeping computation, it wouldn't be possible to interpret it as such, it wouldn't work - that's what makes me believe it's more than semantics.

[bch8_]

First I want to say I don't think this is an unreasonable position nor does it appear to be one without some degree of support in the expert debates. The position taken by this paper is not, as far as I can tell, a universally accepted argument (It isn't some tiny minority either FWIW). The bottom line is that in this field there are simply not many universally accepted positions whatsoever. A helpful framing I came across recently is that the field of consciousness research is still in a "pre-scientific" period in the same sense that astronomy and physics were "pre-scientific" prior to general relativity. Science could be done and theories existed, but something so fundamental was missing that you couldn't even reach a broad consensus on where to direct research.

With that out of the way, in my opinion the response from the position of the paper would be something along these lines. The problem with your claim that a clock intrinsically contains a time keeping algorithm/computation is that by this definition, almost anything you can imagine is a clock. For example, given the right mapping function, a rock can perform all computations necessary to be a clock. It may sound extreme but this is an internally consistent position, if you want you can look up the Putnam triviality argument for more info. Under this argument, not only can a rock perform all the computations necessary to be a clock, it can in fact implement every possible computation imaginable (given the right mapping function). This next bit isn't essential to the argument but just because I find it fascinating, we can take this point a step further. If you imagine an organism/mind capable of using a rock as a clock, it isn't impossible but it would require such a radically different way of perceiving reality that they may in fact not recognize our versions of clocks as clocks at all.

Backing out, the examples above clarify just how essential the mapping function is to imputing meaning to a physical process, and makes it harder to see how the physical processes taking place in our computers have any intrinsic meaning whatsoever. To put my cards on the table, the whole reason I ended up on this thread in the first place is because I have become somewhat obsessed with this paper in the past week or so. I did not expect to agree with it or even to find it particularly convincing. Not that I had given it tons of thought but if you asked me, my operating assumption has always been that the human brain is some form of a computer and, more to the point, that consciousness experienced by human brains is a result of some form of computation. Taken on its own terms, I believe this paper really does challenge that view fundamentally, and in a manner that cannot be easily dismissed.