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< Modernism, Post-modernism, and Neo-modernism.
Can we take it for given that consciousness is a product of computational complexity? I don't see, at least at first glance, why this should be the case. In fact, it's easy to conceive of an extraordinarily complex computer or artificial intelligence which exhibits nothing we can call consciousness. Even if it did, it would remain to be explained at what point and why it had become conscious in the first place.
Consciousness is not merely rendering. A program which parses inputs to produce representations can hardly be called conscious, and even many combinations of such programs will have to have their emergent consciousness, if it even exists, explained. That's precisely my point about the camera and the eye—perceptual and/or representative modules, for lack of a better word, are not conscious in themselves, so why should amalgamating a boatload of them produce consciousness? I'm not saying this couldn't be the case, simply that the likelihood of such emergence is not, it seems to me, self-evident.
Furthermore, it seems suspect to suggest that if something can't be measured, it has no effect (although the reverse might be true). Does this follow? Subjectivity could be a troubling case in this regard, since it absolutely has effects on the world and yet might very well be the paradigmatic case of immeasurability.
A psychological subject describes a dream which her therapist records in writing. Is this not an effect on the physical world (both the verbal description and the physical record) which has its origin in something which is possibly, for the sake of argument, immeasurable (her subjective experience of the dream)? After all, if the dream didn't exist, it couldn't be described, right?
I'm either not explaining myself well or everyone here is being deliberately obtuse. I'll give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume it's the former. Dreams are, like all thoughts, the product of physical processes that occur in the brain. We lack the apparatus to measure this effectively, but this is the case.
I also never said consciousness was the same as a rendering. I'm looking at my old comment and I wonder where this idea of yours came from. Please address the words I actually say and not ones you have come up with for me.
In addition, a computer of sufficient complexity would have to be conscious - it's frankly ridiculous to think consciousness wouldn't arise in sufficiently complex AI. Consciousness is not some magical soul force or anything of the type.