“Nobody thinks, ‘Well, if we do a simulation of a rainstorm, we’re all going to get wet,’ ” he said. “And similarly, a computer simulation of consciousness isn’t thereby conscious.”

We are not gods, capable of creating things in our likeness. All we can make are graven images. John Searle once said something along these lines. Computers, he argued, have always been used to simulate natural phenomena—digestion, weather patterns—and they can be useful to study these processes.

Isn’t this what we are still doing today? We build simulations of brains and hope that some mysterious natural phenomenon—consciousness—will emerge. But what kind of magical thinking makes us think that our paltry imitations are synonymous with the thing they are trying to imitate—that silicon and electricity can reproduce effects that arise from

Privacy was a modern fixation, I said, and distinctly American. For most of human history we accepted that our lives were being watched, listened to, supervened upon by gods and spirits—not all of them benign, either.

his book Flesh and Machines, he claims that most people tend to “overanthropomorphize humans…who are after all mere machines.”

Dennett refers to the belief in interior experience derisively as the “Cartesian theater,” invoking the popular delusion—again,

“Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” Chalmers wrote. “It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.” Twenty-five years later, we are no closer to understanding why.

problem asks why brain processes are accompanied by first-person experience.

the subjective experience of pain. In 1995 the philosopher David Chalmers called this “the hard problem” of consciousness. Unlike the comparatively “easy” problems of functionality,