[NST==>I persist in not seeing the relevance of the physiological information to the question of the nature of consciousness or, if one prefers, the question of how it makes sense to talk about consciousness. I assume [from my vast store of ignorance] that computer folks would all agree that there is no necessary isomorphism between the function that a computer performs and the organization of the machine on which the performance is accomplished.
Progressively larger and more complex programs can run on 16, 32, bit and 64 address space machines. Games can get by on single precision floating point math, but scientific calculations usually require double precision (or more). Scalability can be limited by the dimensionality of the network fabric, or by the speed of latency or bandwidth of memory. Some kind of combinatorics problems can be done on serial processors, others can be done on massively parallel graphics processors, some on custom integrated chips, and others may require exploiting quantum entanglement and tunneling. The hardware tells you about what is possible to feasibly compute given constraints like power, heat dissipation, available operating temperatures. and time. Once the hardware is understood, then one can start to rationalize the low-level software. How are errors in signaling handled? How does the system adapt when operating conditions are not ideal? How can multiple activities be coordinated without one risking the other? Once those low-level software is understood, then higher level behaviors can be modeled. Suppose the computing platform was a robot: How are objects in the vicinity converted from light signals (or radar, etc.) into geometric objects? Layer on that, how are geometry objects named? Layer on that, how do named objects relate to one another logically? Keep going, you’ll eventually get to semantics, philosophy, and so on. All of these things could be described by mathematical models, and that model _is_ the best available story of that level of the cognitive entity. Extending the metaphor to biology, the design decisions aren’t really design of course, they are just circumstance of evolutionary pressures. They may have mathematical regularities across species that are interesting, but it is not clear they must. In this view, it’s not clear it is even worth talking about until the lower levels of processing are understood to be the same or different. I mean, I’ll continue to talk to my dog, because I like to.
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