Consciousness is information processing. That is all it can possibly be.
In fact, it cannot
be that at all.
Now bear with me, here. I'm not saying that it's not useful to describe the operation of the brain in terms of IP. Clearly, it is. In fact, I don't see any other way, as a practical matter, to talk about what the brain does on a high level. I've done this myself on this thread, speaking of coordinating sets of data and using highly processed information and the like.
But we should be careful to always keep in mind that IP is an abstraction for what happens in pysical reality. It makes sense only to us (to humans) because it's our metaphor.
In objective physical reality, there's no IP going on, just chemical reactions, electric conduction, and other purely physical sorts of stuff.
Btw, as a reminder, the reason this is important for this discussion is because of the assertion that the brain can produce consciousness at any operating speed (if we could slow it down) on the grounds that a TM can produce its outputs at any operating speed.
The brain, of course, is a physical organ just like every other organ of the body, and it operates purely by the laws of physics, just like every other organ of the body.
We don't yet know what causes consciousness, although we do know some of what the brain is doing when it generates conscious experience, and we can make some deductions from what we know. But as of now, there simply are no viable hypotheses for how this organ actually achieves this feat.
Nevertheless, we can be sure that when we figure it out, it will turn out to be the result of the physical activity of the brain. After all, what else is there for it to be?
Similarly, when we look at what computers actually do, again, all we see is physics. A computer doesn't work because "information" makes it work. It works because of how it's built as a physical object.
Now, to human beings using computers, there's a layer of IP that we can discern that's useful to us. But that's entirely symbolic, and it's not what makes computers work.
A sufficiently intelligent alien observer with enough access to the physical details of the system -- or a hypothetical omniscient observer -- could describe everything a computer does (such as causing pixels to light up on screens or causing printers to spray ink on paper or causing speakers to generate sound waves or causing trays to extend and retract or making discs spin and lasers lase) in terms of the materials and electricity. (If you believe that the behavior of a computer does not make sense entirely when viewed objectively in this manner, I'd like to hear why.)
Ditto for the brain. If you could know everything about the physical state of the system, everything it did would add up. From birth to death, there would never be a moment when you'd stop and say, "Whoa, why did THAT happen?! That goes against the laws of physics!"
And you know what... in both cases, you wouldn't need to know a single thing about the "information" that we humans talk about when we talk about brains and computers.
Let's get real simple. Take a man adding on an abacus. We can talk about that in terms of IP. But that only makes sense to the human mind. In objective reality, everything that's going on is consistent with the laws of physics, and explainable in those terms. Not just the movement of the beads, but also the movement of the man's body.
As far as we know, everything in this universe is just a physical-energetic chain reaction, and that includes our brains.
So it is not possible that IP is what generates consciousness. IP is purely symbolic. It is our system of understanding and talking about certain things.
But there is no way in which our symbolic abstractions can cause phenomena in the real physical world.
Therefore, we can be certain that it is the physics of the brain, and not IP, which generates consciousness, however it's done.
