>>13360376The mystery in consciousness is mysterious mostly due to the staggering scale of the brain's computation-- it is on the order of 10 gigabyte per cell, or for a human brain, with order 100 billion cells, it's 1 trillion gigabytes, 10^21 bytes. This is simply the total weight of RNA in the brain times 2 bits per base. This is a fucking huge amount of random access memory, it dwarfs every computer we have. This scale of computation we can't even begin to comprehend at the moment.
This is assuming that the computation in the brain is intracellular and done by RNA. The reason to believe this is simply that it gives the right model for the level of computation in the brain, and it is evolvable from cellular mechanisms, it provides a mechanism for memory and learning, and it is the right order of magnitude for the computation we can do, unlike other models which might be more popular, but which fail at accounting for even the simplest cognitive tasks human beings do, like recognizing a bicycle at a glance, and remembering the recognition for some minutes.
A computation of the sort the brain does, when it consists of 10^21 bytes networked together in 10^11 clumps of 10^10 bytes, when it is active and responding to stimuli, is the definition of consciousness, as far as a logical positivist is concerned. It is the ability to decipher and respond to your words, which requires a massive amount of computing on top of computing, with evolving algorithms, with the attendant ability to sense the connotations and subtle implications, and compute the consequences of those. There is no reason to suppose that the quality of consciousness is anything more than this computation, that's what it "feels like" to have such a massive computation.
