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mkehrt comments on Eight questions for computationalists - Less Wrong
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But what about Eliezer's reply to Pigliucci's photosynthesis argument? As I understand it, Eliezer's counterargument was that intelligence and consciousness are like math in the sense that the simulation is the same as the real thing. In other words, we don't care about simulated sugar because we want the physical stuff itself, but we aren't so particular when it comes to arithmetic--the same answer in any form will do.
As far as I can tell, this argument still applies to gold unless there are good reasons to think that consciousness is substrate dependent. But as Eliezer pointed out in that diavlog, that doesn't seem likely.
That reply is entirely begging the question. Whether or not consciousness is a phenomenon "like math" or a phenomenon "like photosynthesis" is exactly is being argued about. So it's not an answering argument; it's an assertion.
I completely agree--XiXiDu was summarizing Massimo Pigliucci's argument, so I figured I'd summarize Eliezer's reply. The real heart of the question, then, is figuring out which one consciousness is really like. I happen to think that consciousness is closer to math than sugar because we know that intelligence is so, and it seems to me that the rest follows logically from Minsky's idea that minds are simply what brains do. That is, if consciousness is what an intelligent algorithm feels like from the inside, then it wouldn't make much sense for it to be substrate-dependent.