It is because computation is an interpretation imposed on a physical system from the outside, but that is distinct from my experience of consciousness; your interpretation of my consciousness is irrelevant.

If I impose a computational interpretation onto inert material after the fact, did that material possess the consciousness? Suppose I overlay a projection of the calculation of an AGI onto a circuit board, is that projection equally conscious to if that circuit board did the computation in the usual way?

Said differently, suppose we take a large computer and simulate a sequence of random byte strings. At each tick we contrive a substring and form a new sequence out of these substrings such that the combined sequence of substrings simulates an AGI. Was consciousness present in the original sequence. Is it even necessary to do any computation at all to create the consciousness then since any intelligent sequence can be interpreted out of anything?

No, that is absurd. The reasonable view is that computation is irrelevant and what is relevant is some special physical process.

You're explaining the part I said I understood instead of the part I asked about. I don't see any reason computation would ever have to lead to true subjective consciousness instead of an externally identical philosophical zombie.

But the alternative is equally absurd. In essence, you have a bunch protons, neutrons and electrons pushing and pulling on each other and somehow that causes consciousness. There just aren't that many weird properties or particles to appeal to as a cause of consciousness. While there are exotic particles and the quarks and gluons that make up protons/neutrons, these particles are relevant for our study of the universe, but they aren't relevant to understanding the human brain. Abstracting protons as a single particle that push and pull on other particles via forces works fine for explaining everything we know about the brain.

Not that it really changes anything if the particular way quarks interact did affect the brain in a way that couldn't be explained through the simplified view of a proton. It adds a few more particles to consider and the weirdness of quantum chromodynamics, but nothing there explains consciousness either.

So how do you go from particles pushing and pulling on each other to consciousness? It seems to me no matter how you arrange a bunch of particles, there is never any reason to assume that arrangement is conscious. It's just a bunch of points moving according to a few simple rules.

If you're saying there is something more in physics, some other force or particle or currently unknown way particles interact that causes consciousness, that's roughly the soul particle idea.

Saying consciousness is caused by a physical process is very vague. What kind of process? Why don't the physical processes the computers running an LLM perform count? Why does the brain qualify? If we go on to build many different types of artificial brains (using silicon or biological cells or anything else), how would you even go about recognizing which artificial thinking machines have the required physical process for consciousness?

I think the role computation / the brain plays is to create a model (which may require a lot of decoding) of the outside world as a physical part of us. Due to some as yet undiscovered physical mechanism, the decoding process in the format the brain uses results in consciousness. Yes this is vague, but this is the only non-absurd position I am aware of, and I will adapt it as soon as a better one is presented.

>>>"Not that it really changes anything if the particular way quarks interact did affect the brain in a way that couldn't be explained through the simplified view of a proton. It adds a few more particles to consider and the weirdness of quantum chromodynamics, but nothing there explains consciousness either.

>>>So how do you go from particles pushing and pulling on each other to consciousness? It seems to me no matter how you arrange a bunch of particles, there is never any reason to assume that arrangement is conscious. It's just a bunch of points moving according to a few simple rules."

The pushing and pulling is another computational process. Consciousness must be some irreducible component of matter or of certain arrangements of matter, so that this matter "just is conscious". The pulling / pushing done in the correct way imposes a complex experience on that matter. I would love to tell you what it is, but my reasoning is a process of elimination, where we eliminate the popular idea that consciousness = computation now when it is very important to humanity to do so.

>>>"equally absurd".

I don't think it is, and I am very passionate about this. If computation is the only explainer of consciousness, then every large enough random collection of bits can be interpreted as representing some conscious process given a complicated enough interpretation rule set. E.g. take an exabyte of random data and extract from it a 1 mb ChatGPT conversation by deciding to include this bit and to exclude that bit. Who's to say that my rule for extracting the correct bits isn't a valid computational process? If I just write a random bit string over an exabyte memory bank over and over, and if some way of interpreting part of it at this frame, and some way of interpreting it in the next frame etc.. etc.. results in an intelligent conversation, was a conscious being simulated? Let's make it more absurd. Take a computation which expresses consciousness. Print out the conversation in bit form onto a piece of paper. Cut up and rearrange the paper into a sequence first of all the 0's and then all the 1's. Then show the result to your friend and say this can be interpreted at a conscious process, therefore is conscious. This is ridiculous. Why is a blank sheet of paper not a conscious process if some guy says by looking at the paper he imagines 50 0's in a row and 100 1's in a row, and those can be rearranged to express a thought in some manner?

>>>"how would you even go about recognizing which artificial thinking machines have the required physical process for consciousness?"

We would not be able to tell until we actually learn more physics, which is the deepest reason I think it is unethical to build them at all. My position on the physical nature of consciousness makes me believe that everything with a neuron-based brain probably has consciousness. And so if we are hell-bent on making something with consciousness, we could do it by growing a brain in a lab. That's not to say I believe only a brain can have consciousness, it's just that it is the only kind I will have confidence in for the time being. The reason I doubt our computer hardware has consciousness is that computation is abundant in the universe (basically anything can be interpreted as computation), and so I doubt that just any arbitrary hardware we've created is likely to interact the computation with the special sauce in the right way.

As I understand it, you don't want to posit the existence of a new particle, or new property of particles (e.g. particles have mass, charge, and some consciousness property), or a new field or anything outside of the standard model of physics. In other words, there is nothing special about the particles themselves that causes consciousness; they're just bits of matter that can push and pull on each other. And when you arrange bits of matter that push and pull on each other in just the right way, it somehow creates consciousness.

If that's all there is, it seems likely you could create consciousness out of marbles connected by springs. If protons and electrons don't have any special consciousness-related property other than pushing and pulling, we'd just have to recreate the arrangement of matter and the forces to get consciousness.

There is no way to make the leap from particles and forces to consciousness that seems intuitively right. No arrangement of dumb matter, whether marbles or protons, should be conscious.

On a somewhat related note: forces are rules that dictate how things move. At some level, position and movement is the only thing we can measure. When we measure something like voltage or charge, our measurement techniques actually rely on observing the movement of particles.

Consciousness doesn't seem like it's just movement. But if there were some other property of our universe that didn't cause movement, we would have no way to measure it. It would have no observable effect on matter. Which would make epiphenomenal consciousness seemingly impossible to prove or disprove even if it were some basic property of physics.