It's not directly related to the original article, but the idea of consciousness arising in any sufficient system reminded me of an essay by Hans Moravec, "Simu

It's not directly related to the original article, but the idea of consciousness arising in any sufficient system reminded me of an essay by Hans Moravec, "Simulation, Consciousness, Existence" [1] (and that essay in turn makes me think of the dust theory of reality described in Greg Egan's "Permutation City"). "Perhaps the most unsettling implication of this train of thought is that anything can be interpreted as possessing any abstract property, including consciousness and intelligence." [1] http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...