Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Angrboda]

Anyway, I don't view consciousness as a thing which requires a certain amount to "turn on."  Rather, a companion set of neural circuits evolved on top of our neural circuits controlling body behavior and perception in order to tie our behavioral responses to our perceptions.  This likely occurred very early on in the evolution of highly mobile animals, and is largely an all or nothing process.  In a fish, it would be used to make behavioral decisions based on perception of the environment.  My suspicion is that an animal like a black fly doesn't have this extra layer of decision making apparatus, and has more or less pre-programmed responses to light, shadow, smell, and sound in its environment.  That a fly has an algorithm, whereas a fish has true consciousness.  But I could be wrong.  Perhaps a fly has consciousness, too.

Would you agree with Rhythm, then, that a non-organic system (say a computer) which can do this kind of complex coordination, is conscious?

I believe consciousness is a very specific computation which requires specific structural elements to be present for it to work. A computer would have to duplicate that structure to be conscious. A typical computer doesn't have the necessary computations in place to be conscious.

On another note, it seems likely to me that any organism which is capable of motivated behavior (in other words, 100% of living things), have a kind of consciousness.  They have some built-in sense of how the world should be for them, and a strong motivation to bring themselves to that state.  I think (again, I can't claim to know), that when you try to swat a fly, it knows it doesn't want to be swatted, and takes a very deliberate evasive action.

It's a matter of degree, not kind, I think. Consciousness is an algorithm but not all algorithms are consciousness. A fly would have an algorithm for responding to events in its environment, but it wouldn't necessarily be the algorithm type that is consciousness. From my observation of flies, their behavior seems rather automatic, but perhaps.