"Running a program" is a rather vague expression. We could excuse philosophers for using such vague expressions because most of them aren't very tech-savvy. Fo

"Running a program" is a rather vague expression. We could excuse philosophers for using such vague expressions because most of them aren't very tech-savvy. For engineers, though, that kind of wording should immediately raise a red flag. Running a computer program involves many different kinds of things. There's data (state), and there's logic to manipulate said data. There's communication among the various components of the machine, and a whole lot of machinery dedicated to synchronizing said communication because otherwise it all becomes garbage. Any one of these, or a combination of these, could be a candidate for the seat of consciousness. Philosophers who talk about computation are often preoccupied with the fancy logic gates, and not so much on the mundane circuitry needed to maintain state and synchronize it across components. To me, though, those parts seem much more likely to be analogous to what we call consciousness. Treating consciousness as a kind of state, synchronized across the brain, is the closest way to capture the author's insistence that it is a kind of "unified, integrated whole." Drugs alter consciousness by creating network partitions, inhibiting cache invalidation, corrupting data in flight, etc.