Absolutely everything you experience is consciousness. You have never experienced concrete objective reality, you have only ever experienced experiences, which is consciousness.
Every idea you have about concrete objective reality is an idea. Ideas are experiences, which are consciousness.
As much as you think you know what is "real", when does "real" exist? Thoughts of the past only ever arise in the present. Thoughts of the future only ever arise in the present.
Within this present experience, which is when everything has ever occurred, can you find anything that is not an experience?
That is a good point, and it bothered me for some period of time, but there is a way to resolve it.
First, we have to recognize that "your own consciousness" is a dualistic framework that assumes that there is a subject (observer) and object (observed).
If you do not assume experience to be "my experience", but rather experience that simply knows itself, then we can see that all experiences are simply known of themselves. When hearing a sound, there is just the sound. No hearer. When seeing the sight, there is just the sight. No seer. When feeling the sensation, there is just the sensation. No feeler.
Why is it then that the feeling and the seeing seem to be occurring to "me" when they are in actuality simply occurring to themselves? It is because this self-known experiences are highly integrated with each other within this body. I assume that you too are having experiences that are not "happening to you", but are rather self known. So your hearing is just the heard. Your seeing is just the seen. Since "your" seen and "my" seen are not integrated, they appear to be happening "over there" and "over here".
But, due to this lack of integration, I ultimately can not be sure that there are other experiences out there, but it seems like a good pragmatic assumption :-)
We can't, at least not with Turing machines or with things equivalent to Turing machines. Feynman showed in 1982 [1] that Turing machines suffer exponential slowdowns when trying to simulate quantum physics.
Computing physical processes beyond some special cases (which include many very useful physical processes) will have to wait for advances in quantum computing.
[1] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall05/frs119/pa...
At what point does it become conscious ? It doesn't seem to me like it would.
As the comic says, electricity is the same thing as rocks just faster processing.
Basic consciousness remains an unsolved problem in my eyes.
When do you make decisions? Do you make them in the past? Do you make them in the future? Past and future do not exist. They are simply memories and fantasies arising in this present moment.
If past and future don't really exist and decisions are made this present moment, is your decision pre-determined or is simply instantly determined, now?
If the future were totally deterministic, it would have already been computed. But, it hasn't yet been computed. We are the computation happening right now, and there is reasonable reason to believe that a multitude of possibilities may collapse into the actuality of this moment.
Lets go back to this moment, now. Can you find a present moment in which outcomes are determined? Or, are you left with an infinitely slippery field of experience where outcomes are never fully resolved, but rather constantly morph into a new nowness?
What if you, as the experiencer are not a thing that happened in the past or will happen in the future, but rather are exactly this nowness, this exact unfolding computation. What if you are not the data but the present processing?
So, instead of us being the coin that decides in mid-flight, what if we are the processing/unfolding that is deciding?
The hard problem has to do with the mere fact of subjective experience. The fact that we experience something rather than nothing.
The various permutations of consciousness that make up the entirety of one's experience of reality and the functional relationship between them can of-course be modelled computationally.