Maybe not with humans, but definitely for octopuses!
(More seriously, depending on how seriously you take embodied cognition, there may be some small loss. I mean, we know that your gut bacteria influence your mood via the nerves to the gut; so there are connections. And once there are connections, it becomes much more plausible that cut connections may decrease consciousness. After a few weeks in a float tank, how conscious would you be? Not very...)
I'm pretty sure that you agree that none of this means that a human brain in a vat with proper connections to the environment, real or simulated, is inherently less conscious than one attached to a body.
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.