The trouble is going from a mechanism to consciousness. Really not clear why consciousness is required for anything at all or how possibly in could emerge. Yet — ala Descartes — surely the awareness of our own thought is the thing we can be most certain of. Everything else could be an illusion except for that.

Even the awareness of our own thoughts, and certainly the sensation that we're somehow "in control of them" (vs being determined by the laws of physics) is almost certainly largely an illusion...

The leap of logic is using a simile to draw a paralell between a human and a computer program.

You don’t even have an argument. Just a who’s-to-say.

Au contraire, the leap of logic is assuming that computer programs could never be sentient. We simply don’t have any proof either way, so we have to assume the possibility.

Sorry about the blase reply, then.

> Au contraire, the leap of logic is assuming that computer programs could never be sentient.

That’s not quite what I meant. I don’t categorically dismiss the possibility.

> We simply don’t have any proof either way, so we have to assume the possibility.

Like God?

Who’s to say that computations occur at all? Maybe reality is just one great big static lookup table?

> Who's to say that a brain is not a kind of a computer and that all humans are a sort of a computer program?

An interesting insight from a book I won't remember:

When clockwork was the most advanced technology, many books talked about how people are just like clockwork. When steam was the most advanced, many books talked about how humans are just like steam engines. When cars were the most advanced, people were just like cars. And now we're just like computers.

And the ancients talked about how people are just like flowing this or that. Because waterworks were the advanced tech of the time.

Yeah this is largely the availability bias of techies

Today, synthesizing viruses and modifying DNA is at the forefront of technology:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6171941/

For some reason, books don't talk about how humans are just like DNA though. But the logical extension of those technologies is to design and build biological organisms.

Obviously, if that ever happens, humans will say that humans are like those organisms.

But then someone will remember the quote. And because the quote has been true in the past, and humans were nothing like clockwork, steam engines, or computers, then, by extension, humans are also not like biological organisms.

Which is nonsense, unless you assume that humans contain something metaphysical and unreproducible.

If not, then you have to agree that at some point the distinction will blur. But at which point?

> the logical extension of those technologies is to design and build biological organisms

A friend of mine was doing her PhD on "implementing NAND gates in DNA" almost 10 years ago now. Microbiology is wild.

I think the distinction will be that humans aren't like designed/programmed biological organisms. At least until we are ...