Never came by this draft. Is it new? (Though he has been working with it for quite some time..) I will take a look at it. But beforehand, my general view on simulations/emulations, is that even solely non-agency statistical simulations of an agent's behaviour, if precise enough, would contain what matters on suffering/pleasure. Memories feelings, thoughts and so on would be all shattered throughout many, many variables, but the correlations which would have to hold between all of these might still guarantee there would still be a (perhaps sentient) agent there.

One rational ability that people are really good at that is hard (i.e. we haven't made much progress in automating) is applying common sense knowledge to language understanding. Here's a collection of sentences where the referent is ambiguous, but we don't even notice because we are able to match it up as quickly as we read: http://www.hlt.utdallas.edu/~vince/data/emnlp12/train-emnlp12.txt

You can read a paper on EURISKO here. My impression is that the program quickly exhausted the insights he put in as heuristics, and began journeying down eccentric paths that were not of interest to a human mathematician.

Here's my advice: always check Snopes before forwarding anything.

"Unlike these other highly-contrived hypothetical scenarios we invent to test extreme corner-cases of our reasoning, this highly-contrived hypothetical scenario is a parody. If you ever find yourself in the others, you have to take it seriously, but if you find yourself in this one, you are under no such obligation."

I think most of the commenters aren't getting that this is a parody. Edit: It turns out I was wrong.

Care to elaborate on why?

We know that some complex processes in our own brains happen unaccompanied by qualia. This is uncontroversial. It doesn't seem unlikely to me that all the processes needed to fake perceptual consciousness convincingly could be implemented using a combination of such processes. I don't know what causes qualia in my brain and so I'm not certain it would be captured by the emulation in question-- for example, the emulation might not be at a high enough level of detail, might not exploit quantum mechanics in the appropriate way, or whatever. Fading and dancing qualia arguments are not really convincing to me because I don't trust my intuition to guide me well in situations where my core self is directly being operated on.
In other words, I am uncertain and so would tend to stick with what I know works (my biological brain) instead of trusting an uploading process to maintain my qualia. (note: 'qualia' may be an unfamiliar term. It means what it is like to experience something, the redness of red. It's a better word to use than consciousness for this because it is more specific.)

I turned in my PhD dissertation. Here's the title and first paragraph of the abstract:

PRODUCTIVE VISION: METHODS FOR AUTOMATED IMAGE COMPREHENSION

Image comprehension is the ability to summarize, translate, and answer basic questions about images. Using original techniques for scene object parsing, material labeling, and activity recognition, a system can gather information about the objects and actions in a scene. When this information is integrated into a deep knowledge base capable of inference, the system becomes capable of performing tasks that, when performed by students, are considered by educators to demonstrate comprehension.

(Basically it is computer vision combined with Cyc.)

Perhaps a good place to start would be the literature on life satisfaction and happiness. Statistically speaking, what changes in life that can be made voluntarily lead to the greatest increase in life satisfaction at the least cost in effort/money/trouble?