Thank you for bringing in the snippet.

To analyse its contents, I'll ask this: what's to say that a computer doesn't experience some very primitive form of consciousness? If we unplugged everything except the power cord, but left a complicated simulation running, it would still have something like "a rich inner life." Its peripherals and sensors give it a sense of a body and, with abstract drivers, a degree of conceptual separation from said hardware. Doubly so in the case of virtual machines. After all, we can't "truly" experience the same thing that a computer might from the inside, so who are we to doubt "computer consciousness?"

If the proponents of "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" can't give a quantified explanation of how to distinguish a theoretical computer consciousness from a human one, that raises the question of whether the problem actually exists.

For my part, I don't believe in consciousness as a concrete thing, only a label we use to group together quite a few disparate systems and phenomenon. It's the same way that I don't believe in "Ruby" as a concrete thing, but only in the unit tests, the sample code, the docs, and the thoughts in Matz's head that we subconsciously conflate.