[Kattywumpus]

One analogy might be to the misleadingly named motion picture. We all have heard the stories of early cinema-goers who dove out of the way when the train on the screen barreled towards them. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking of these images on the screen as the real thing -- even the mistake of thinking that they move.

But they don't move. They can't. In the end, a film is just a series of still images. The images are projected in such rapid succession that they fool us into seeing things in motion that are not actually in motion. And if we slowed the film down enough, from 20 frames a second, to say, a frame every 20 seconds, well... the illusion would stop. We'd see each discrete still image for exactly what it was.

This is the same way computers work. Every tick of the clock, we get a new static image in memory. But those images are all static, as still as the images on film. And no static matrix of information can be conscious, just like no still image can move.

This is radically different than the neurons in our brains, which are each living things, sensing things, with a continuous analog existence. Whatever we feel comes from their lives. We can measure the things they do with their lives, but we shouldn't mistake the measurement for the thing being measured. A ruler is a foot long, but it’s not ticklish.