This doesn't address my confusion. Suppose I just wrote down on paper the states of a simulated brain at time t, t1, t2, etc. Would the model be conscious? Is it still conscious if I simulate step t1, and then wander away for a while?
My sense is that consciousness is a property of biological humans in the physical world and that it's not necessarily useful as a description for anything else. It's a social construction and probably doesn't have any useful summary in terms of physics or computer science or properties of neurons.
Would the model be conscious?
Yes.
Is it still conscious if I simulate step t1, and then wander away for a while?
Would a human be conscious, if you could magically stop time? No, while the time is stopped, there is no consciousness.
Consciousness is an activity; it happens in time. It's like running. Is the simulated robot running? Yes. If you pause the simulation, is the robot still running? No, it's frozen in the middle of running, it is not running while paused.
In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.
Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).
I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.