I'm well aware that many people are wrong about consciousness and have been misled by Searle, Chalmers, Nagel, et. al. Numbers like 55% are argumentum ad populum and are completely irrelevant. The sample space matters ... I've been to the "[Towards a] Science of Consciousness" conferences and they are full of cranks and loony tunes, and even among respectable intelligent philosophers of mind there is little knowledge or understanding of neuroscience, often proudly so. These philosophers should read Arthur Danto's introduction to C.L. Hardin's "Color for Philosophers". I've partied with David Chalmers--fun guy, very bright, but has done huge damage to the field. Roger Penrose likewise--a Nobel Prize winning physicist but his knowledge of the brain comes from that imbecile Stuart Hameroff. The fact remains that consciousness is a physical function of physical brains--collections of molecules--and can definitely be the result of computation--this isn't an "assumption", it's the result of decades of study and analysis. e.g., people who think that Searle's Chinese Room argument is valid have not read Larry Hauser's PhD thesis ("Searle's Chinese Box: The Chinese Room Argument and Artificial Intelligence") along with a raft of other criticism utterly debunking it (including arguments from Chalmers).

> It's an analogy.

And I pointed out why it's an invalid one -- that was the whole point of my comment.

> But just like the pot of gold, that might be a false assumption.

But it's not at all "just like the pot of gold". Rainbows are perceptual phenomena, their perceived location changes when the observer moves, they don't have "ends", and there certainly aren't any pots of gold associated with them--we know for a fact that these are "false assumptions"--assumptions that no one makes except perhaps young children. This is radically different from consciousness and computation, even if it were the case that somehow one could not get consciousness from computation. Equating or analogizing them this way is grossly intellectually dishonest.

> Someone sees computing, assuming consciousness is at the end of it, so they think fi there were more computing, there would be more likelihood of consciousness.

Utter nonsense.