You ask "is consciousness a property of certain physical systems which isn't present even in extremely faithful computer simulations of those systems, or consciousness something else?" and later say "if you _had_ such a model, and could run it forward, people would still be divided as to whether it was actually conscious or not".
It seems to me that you thereby answer your first question with "no", as it seems that for you, by the last sentence, consciousness is a metaphysical property...
Which I would be fine with: I think we will only know more once we have an entity that looks and acts humanly (so there is reason to suppose consciousness might exist in it) and then try to understand its formal, inner workings and compare it to the human brain. No matter the outcome, it will be very interesting.
> It seems to me that you thereby answer your first question with "no", as it seems that for you, by the last sentence, consciousness is a metaphysical property...
That is absolutely not what I said. From my first post in this conversation I said "we've never settled on a definition of consciousness". In my preceding post, in describing a hypothetical, I said "people would still be divided as to whether it was actually conscious or not, _because the basic properties of consciousness are not settled_."
"People will disagree about X" does not in anyway amount to "I believe that X is a metaphysical property."
The absence of a clear definition means that people will continue to disagree regardless of the evidence about whichever physical system that you examine, because they're bringing different conceptions of consciousness to the table. If you know in advance that no evidence will be able to answer the question as currently framed, there's no need to wait for it; we must refine the question first.
You ask "is consciousness a property of certain physical systems which isn't present even in extremely faithful computer simulations of those systems, or consciousness something else?" and later say "if you _had_ such a model, and could run it forward, people would still be divided as to whether it was actually conscious or not".
It seems to me that you thereby answer your first question with "no", as it seems that for you, by the last sentence, consciousness is a metaphysical property...
Which I would be fine with: I think we will only know more once we have an entity that looks and acts humanly (so there is reason to suppose consciousness might exist in it) and then try to understand its formal, inner workings and compare it to the human brain. No matter the outcome, it will be very interesting.