The analogy with a digital computer has energised and strongly influenced our thinking about the human mind for at least sixty years, beginning with Turing’s seminal paper of 1950, ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, and gaining in influence as computers became first real, and then ubiquitous. Whether or not you like the analogy, I think you’d have to concede that it has often set the terms of the discussion over recent decades. Yet we’ve never got it quite clear, and in some respects we’ve almost always got it wrong.
In particular, I’d like to suggest: consciousness is an output, not processing.
Conscious Entities
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