On naturalism and consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

Here's a point to consider-- the brain never reaches the exact same state twice, either. It is in a case of constant flux-- the movement of blood, chemicals, neurotransmitters, etc, the cycle of a neuron firing and the time it takes to "recharge" before it can be stimulated again, etc. I have serious doubts that if you could feed the exact same input into a person (something that's impossible, but let's imagine), that the exact same neurons would fire.

They don't have to, we're looking for the proper abstraction, not the proper sequence leading to any given abstraction(especially) in a NN sort of framework. There are places where my gates break down, cease to be informative. I use them to explain principle, and how mechanical interaction can achieve the effect of that principle. We actually know for a fact that our brains don't work -exactly- the same way as a cpu with our current architecture.

We're basically flirting between two sets of problems, or two ways of designing around a problem. One type of architecture is useful for one set, another, a different set.

This is an important way in which a brain is different than a computer. A computer, given the same inputs, CAN activate the exact same circuits, in the exact same way (on the macro level at least).

-Some- computers can, yes (architecture, as above).