Issue is that we don’t need it to explain humans either. Most people think that a human is sentient and a rock isn’t – but humans and rocks are both atoms bouncing around, so you need an explanation for what’s different.

I think most physicists think that if you started with a description of the positions and velocities etc of all the particles in a human, and put them into a supercomputer the size of the moon, and had the computer run a simulation using the standard model, then the simulated human would act identically to a real human.

But there’s a number of open questions when it comes to consciousness – would the simulated human have a simulated consciousness, or would it have a consciousness that’s just as real as yours or mine despite coming from a simulation?

If the consciousness is just as real as yours or mine, that obviously means it would be very unethical to simulate a human being tortured, since you’d be creating the exact same consciousness experience you would get if you tortured a non-simulated person. isn’t it kind of a surprising implication that there’d be programs that are unethical to run? A bunch of logic gates computing pi presumably have no conscious experience, but if you make them fire in a different order they do?

Meanwhile, if the simulation doesn’t have a conscious experience, then that means you don’t need consciousness at all to explain human behavior, same as you don’t need it to explain ELIZA.

Anyway, since you’re a physicist I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts