Ok, well, I'd like to come to a meeting of the minds here, because I have a hard time understanding how you can be saying what you seem to be saying.
Cog brain, silicone brain, ok.
I'm not certain cogs would work, but I won't discount them.
Well, let's stop here for a moment, because it is absolutely fundamental.
Bear with me. It's vital to understanding this.
A Turing machine is (almost*) nothing more than a paper tape, a motor that can either move that tape one step forward or one step back, and four basic instructions: move tape forward, move tape backwards, write a 1, read the tape at the current position.
That's it. Turing proved that this simple setup can compute
anything computable. Furthermore, if something can be reduced to a TM (such as your PC, a parallel processor, a neuron, etc) it also can compute anything computable. There are several important correllarys to that that I think you are missing.
This means that any combination of computable things is still computable. So, you hook 10 serial processors together into a parallel network, it still reduces to a TM, and is computable. eleventy nine trillion neurons hooked together with a sophisticated hormone/chemical infrastructure - computable. Etc.
Furthermore, computable objects can only do computable things. There is no way to cobble up transisters to come up with something uncomputable. Likewise, neurons. So, if neurons are computable (you've agreed they are), then the whole brain is computable.
Therefore, the whole brain can be replaced with one single TM - a paper tape, a motor moving that tape, and a pen! that writes one on that tape (and the list of instructions, of course).
That's information science 101 - covered in any undergrad course.
Cogs can be made into a computer, hence a TM, hence cogs can compute anything computable.
But lets make an actual TM. Now, we have a machine that writes 1's on a piece of paper that replaces a brain - it can do
everything a brain can do, unless you say something in the brain is not computable (nobel prize for that one). it's a pen, paper, and some instructions for how to write the data on the paper.
Note I pointed out parallel machines, of
any complexity, so long as they are made of computable elements, reduce to a TM. Consult the literature for that one, the proof is too much for a forum post.
For convenience, let's consider a wired brain.
With a wired brain, you can actually move information around as in a human brain. You can set up the modules, aggregate the data, route it around.
Yup. And you can do exactly the same thing with a TM, which is nothing more than pen and paper, with a few simple rules as to how to move the pen around on the paper.
A pencil, however, can't actually do any of that. Not in reality.
yes, in reality. it just so happens a human is pushing that pencil around in your thought experiment. In
my thought experiment, the pen is being pushed around by a TM.
So the comparison to swaying daisies or waterbuffalo farts is apt. They can't generate consciousness, either.
Inapt because there is no program controlling the swaying. The TM, pushing a pen on paper, has a program.
Of course, the movement of the pencil can indeed draw symbols which helps a human brain to trace, symbolically, streams of data by performing its own computations. But it's not going on in the pencil, as it is in the wired brain.
Only because you are thinking about it dualistically. You are thinking about the pencil brain, then posit something else (the human brain) interpreting those pencil pushes. The TM removes that human brain. All there is is the TM. If attached to a little robot body that robot would run around, play, argue about TM, learn to play the cello, etc., and neither piggy or roger would have any idea what 10010010101010011010101011111101011011.... means on that paper tape.
In fact, it's not going on in the mind either -- not physically. There are physical analogs to that activity, but it's not really happening objectively.
I hope you see it really is happening. There really is a pencil, really is paper tape, really is a program in the TM, really is patterns on that tape, really is patterns on the tape responding to other patterns on the tape, etc. No human brain trying to figure out that 010101010010010101010101010101001010100101010010100... represents a bee. Just a motor, a pencil, a paper tape, and a really long program.
The question is, do we actually have the kind of data coherence that's needed for a physical brain to do the physical work that's required for a real being to actually maintain consciousness in reality?
that's what the OP posits. If we didn't have it, of course we wouldn't have consciousness. If I built a TM with real parts and ran it in this world, trying to process real time inputs (watch my dog run accross the floor) it'll be way, way, way, way too slow. But we are talking about slowing the inputs and outputs to the speed of the TM. That reduces to the case of relativity. You are running 1/googleplex of some being in a galaxy receeding from us at almost the speed of light, yet you are conscious. So long as the inputs and the brain are running at compatible speeds, there is consciousness.
*google TM for a full definition, there's a few additional details, such as you need a comparison instruction (if the tape read is one, move right and write 0, otherwise move right and write 1). The wikipedia article is pretty robust on this point.
