Ah, I think I understand your position better now. Thanks for clarifying.

So, OK... if I understand you correctly, you're saying that when a building is burning, we can formally describe that process as a property of the building, but when a program is executing, that isn't a property of the program, but rather of the system executing the program, such as a brain.

And therefore you want to talk about consciousness as a property of program-executors (physical embodiments of minds) rather than of programs themselves.

Yes? Have I got that more or less right?

Sure, I would agree with that as far as it goes, though I don't think it's particularly important.

I would similarly say that I can't actually write a program that calculates the square root of 200, because programs can't do any such thing. Rather, it is the program executor that performs the calculation, making use of the program.

And I would similarly say that this distinction, while true enough, isn't particularly important.

Digressing a little... it's pretty common for humans to use metonymy to emphasize what we consider the important part of the system. So it's no surprise that we're in the habit of talking metonymically about what "the program" does, since most of us consider the program the important part... that is, we consider two different program-executors running the same program identical in the most important ways, and consider a single program-executor running two different programs (at different times) to be different in the most important ways.

So it's unlikely that we'll stop talking that way, since it expresses something we consider important.

But, sure, I agree that when we want more precision for some reason it can be useful to recognize that it's actually the program executor that is exhibiting the behavior which the program specifies (such as consciousness, or calculating the square root of 200), not the program itself.

So, going back to your original comment with that context in mind:

Suppose I just wrote down on paper the states of a simulated brain at time t, t1, t2, etc. Would the model be conscious?

In normal conversation I would say "yes."

But to be more precise about this: in this case there is a system (call it S) comprising your brain, a piece of paper, and various other things. S is executing some unspecified program that generates a series of mind-executing-system states (in this case, simulated brain-states). Not all programs cause consciousness when executed, of course, any more than all programs cause the calculation of the square root of 200. But if S is executing such a program, then S is conscious while executing it.

I'm not exactly sure what "the model" refers to in this case, but if the model includes the relevant parts of S then yes, the model is conscious.

Is it still conscious if I simulate step t1, and then wander away for a while?

This, too, is to some extent a matter of semantics.

If system S2 spends 5 seconds calculating the first N digits of pi, pauses to do something else for a second, then spends 5 seconds calculating the next N digits of pi, it's not particularly interesting to ask whether S2 spent 10 or 11 seconds calculating those 2N digits. If I want to be more precise, I can say S2 is calculating pi for the intervals of time around each step in the execution, so if we choose intervals short enough S2's calculation is intermittent, while if we choose intervals long enough it is continuous. But there is no right answer about the proper interval length to choose; it depends on what kind of analysis we're doing.

Similarly, if S generates state t1 and then disintegrates (for example, you wander away for a while) and then later reintegrates (you return) and generates t2, whether we consider S to remain conscious in the interim is essentially a function of the intervals we're using for analysis.

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.

Why do you believe this? It doesn't seem to follow from the above: even if consciousness is a property of program-executors rather than of the programs themselves, it doesn't follow that only biological humans can execute the appropriate programs.