I agree with you that Watson's information processing style is significantly different from a human's.
I consider the "We don't understand X, and we don't understand Y, so maybe Y explains X" school of explanation (which is mostly my takeaway of Penrose, but I'll admit to only having read less than half of one of his books, so I may be doing him an injustice) more of an appeal to shared ignorance than an actual explanation.
I don't consider "how do I know that everybody else is real?" a terribly interesting question. My answer is either "because I can make reliable predictions based on that assumption," or "I don't know; so what?", depending on definitions, and either way it doesn't affect my behavior much.
And when we get to the point where basing my predictions about a computer program's behavior on the assumption that it's conscious, or is a real person, or whatever, allows me to make reliable predictions about it, I'll do the same thing for it as I do for other people.
I consider the "We don't understand X, and we don't understand Y, so maybe Y explains X" school of explanation (which is mostly my takeaway of Penrose, but I'll admit to only having read less than half of one of his books, so I may be doing him an injustice) more of an appeal to shared ignorance than an actual explanation.
I read his whole book and I think this is a large part of it. What I would throw in is "we know an awful lot about physics across all relevant size scales and energy scales likely to be seen in the human brain. So it s...
Suppose I have choice between the following:
A) One simulation of me is run for me 100 years, before being deleted.
B) Two identical simulations of me are run for 100 years, before being deleted.
Is the second choice preferable to the first? Should I be willing to pay more to have multiple copies of me simulated, even if those copies will have the exact same experiences?
Forgive me if this question has been answered before. I have Googled to no avail.