The values of the GLUT have to be populated somehow, which means matching an instance of the associated computation against an identical stimulus by some means at some point in the past. Intuitively it seems likely that a GLUT is too simple to instantiate consciousness on its own, but it seems to be better viewed as one component of a larger system that must in practice include a conscious agent, albeit one temporally and spatially removed from the thought experiment's present.
Isn't this basically a restatement of the Chinese Room?
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.