On naturalism and consciousness

[Surgenator]

But that's not the point. You've identified a lot of outputs that we as people would identify as important. But what's to say the sum total of a galaxy's interactions, with near-infinite complexity, leading to a supernova with a burst of photons heading off to an observer in a distant galaxy, isn't communicating the result of a simple binary gate: light = galaxy known to exist there, lack of light = galaxy not know to exist there? Or that even lacking an observer, those few photons' effect cascade via a Butterfly Effect to a major event in that distant galaxy?

Entropy destroys the detail intricacies. So on large scales like a galaxy, you only have to worry about gravity and not how many supernova's went off.

Or at a smaller level, who's to say that the assimilation of a photon's energy into an electron isn't both a gate and a memory device: a gate, because it represents a boolean truth: that the photon bears the right quantum energy to be absorbed; and a memory device because that electron's energy level is sustained until a future interaction?

The amount of energy an electron can absorb from a photon is not 0 or 1, it is a continuum (0, 0.00001, 002, ... 0.9999, 1, 1.222, 999999, etc). Google "compton scattering" for an example.