Just FYI, in quantum computing the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle states that any physical process can be simulated by a computer[1]. So assuming the principle is true (computers can certainly simulate all known physics, in principle), and assuming consciousness is a physical process (however you define it!), computers can simulate consciousness.
Many secular people seem to apply a mystic woo-woo to consciousness, but aren’t willing to take the leap that consciousness is actually metaphysical. I personally don’t think it’s metaphysical, just poorly understood philosophically and basically unexplored scientifically. If you do think it’s metaphysical then I don’t know how to persuade you otherwise. The philosophy here really is shaky! But the known science states that computers can simulate consciousness.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing–Deutsch_principl...
To me this argument is like saying, "Science shows that cold fusion could certainly provide the energy needed for an antigravity machine".
I'm not qualified to say whether that middle inductive step with this Church-Turing-Deutsch principle really holds or not, but I do know that neither quantum computing nor consciousness are well-understood, rigorously defined things.
> He observed that classical physics, which makes use of the concept of real numbers, cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, which can only represent computable reals. Deutsch proposed that quantum computers may actually obey the CTD principle, assuming that the laws of quantum physics can completely describe every physical process.
I don’t necessarily feel like arguing further about this tiny issue, or a distraction about your misconceptions regarding quantum computing[1]; this problem has been widely discussed since Deutsch and there are plenty of sources out there. The point is that it takes a huge cognitive leap to suggest that consciousness is either fundamentally spiritual, or part of a (hypothetical) class of physics problems that can’t be solved by a computer.
[1] Quantum computers are real. You are confused by news stories about private companies with outlandish claims of powerful quantum computers. In physics laboratories, small quantum computers have existed for a few decades. Typically they are too small to do anything useful (I saw one in person that could factor any positive integer... if it was less than 15).
It may or may not be the case that anything intelligent enough necessarily becomes conscious anyway, but there's no way that intrinsic difficulties with simulating "consciousness" could block us from getting intelligent behaviour.
Maybe we're like this too.
A consciousness is unpredictable and I doubt it can actually be modeled on a computer.
Complex, most likely. Unpredictable? I think not.
The crux is that you cannot determine a mechanism to distinguish between this "Chinese room" and someone who actually 'understands'. Therefore, is there a meaningful difference?
Things like RNNs and Transformers that include a temporally linked concept of attention based on input could be said to be "reacting" more than traditional "predicting" architectures.
In my opinion, what's missing for conscious AI is a way to model causality. If we ever achieve that it's just a matter of computational resources since an AI can seep through the cause and effect chain (graph maybe) until it finds what needs to be done to obtain a wanted outcome. That is critical thinking and which I strongly associate with consciousness and/or intelligence.
If you had a language model that really could perfectly predict what you were going to say next, it would have to have a complete working predictive model of you and your reasoning.