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With a machine merely mimicking a brain’s logical processes, however numerous or complex, it is truly preposterous to believe that a mind is at work inside the box

In any case, no process can be said to actually be consciousness, any more than a digital piano can be called a musician, even if it has a massive repertoire with complex programs that make it indistinguishable from a human player. Basically, no quantity of observed correlations between a brain, the information it processes, and what that brain’s owner experiences is adequate to get us from the world of encoded information to the qualitative world of someone being informed. Consciousness could be an innate property of all living organisms, or of matter in general, or even be independent of matter, operating as a field that is concentrated and finds an interface in neural networks through some as yet unknown principle.