that would imply that there are no circumstances under which there physical differrence could be observed or measured.
How, exactly? I am allowing any section of the system to become as if a black box, replaceable with a different black box. As the insides of the boxes are different, they are not identical. Open the boxes, and see the differences. All I'm arguing is that so long as the boxes are closed, they may do the same thing.
As an example, imagine a pair of motors that take in sunlight and oil and create heat and energy. One has inefficient sun and oil to energy converters, the other has an efficient oil engine and simply wastes the sunlight as heat. Arbitrarily, its program regulates its efficiency as a function of the sunlight it receives.
Or imagine a modern PC emulating a mac OS emulating Windows, as against a slightly older PC.
Bear in mind that I didn't understand your a) or b).
One black box is equivalent to another so long as you don't peek inside. So the outputs you get if, or instance, you X ray it, are not part of the subset of outputs under which they are equivalent.
If such official, at-the-edge outputs are all that matters for computationalism, then dumb-but-fast Look Up Tables could be conscious, which is a problem.
If the inner workings of black boxes count, then the Turing Test is flawed,. for similar reasons.
This post is a followup to "We are not living in a simulation" and intended to help me (and you) better understand the claims of those who took a computationalist position in that thread. The questions below are aimed at you if you think the following statement both a) makes sense, and b) is true:
"Consciousness is really just computation"
I've made it no secret that I think this statement is hogwash, but I've done my best to make these questions as non-leading as possible: you should be able to answer them without having to dismantle them first. Of course, I could be wrong, and "the question is confused" is always a valid answer. So is "I don't know".
a) Something that an abstract machine does, as in "No oracle Turing machine can compute a decision to its own halting problem"?
b) Something that a concrete machine does, as in "My calculator computed 2+2"?
c) Or, is this distinction nonsensical or irrelevant?
ETA: By the way, I probably won't engage right away with individual commenters on this thread except to answer requests for clarification. In a few days I'll write another post analyzing the points that are brought up.