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David_Allen comments on The conscious tape - Less Wrong
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Consciousness is a roughly defined and (leaky) abstraction.
Without context the content of the tape has no meaning. So the consciousness that has been output on the tape, is only a consciousness in the context that can use it to generate the consciousness abstraction.
It is the set of "stuff" that produces the consciousness abstraction that can be called conscious. In a Turing machine, this "stuff" would be the tape plus the machine that gives the tape the necessary context.
As Nisan asked above: Is this Turing machine conscious if you don't run it?
It seems that consciousness requires some type of thought, and that thought requires the system to self-modify. A static representation of the Turing machine then does not meet this requirement.
So a Turing machine that is not running is not conscious.
Is there another perspective to consider?