I'll try and clarify the questions which came out as nonsense merely due to being phrased badly (rather than philosophical disagreement).
5: I basically meant, "can you simulate a human brain on a computer?". The "any degree of accuracy" thing was just to try and prevent arguments of the kind "well you haven't modelled every single atom in every single neuron", while accepting that a crude chatbot isn't good enough.
7: By "Theory of everything" I mean a set of axioms that will in principle predict the result of any physics experiment. Would you expect to see equations such as "consciousness = f(x), qualia = g(x)"? Or would you instead say "these equations describe the physical world to any required level of detail, yet I still don't see where the consciousness comes from"? (EDIT: I'm still not making sense here, so it may be best just to ignore this one)
8: People seem more eager to taboo the word "real" than the word "conscious". Not sure there's much I can do to rephrase this one. I wrote it in order to frame q9, which was easier to phrase in terms of reality than consciousness.
9: Sorry for the inferential distance. I was basically referring to the concept some people here call "reality fluid". A better question might be: how do you resolve Eliezer Yudkowsky's little confusion here?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/
11: This question is referring to q2-10 only.
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.