Do Computers Have the Wrong "Substrate" for Consciousness? Two Flavors of Biological Naturalism

Biological naturalists (e.g., Godfrey-Smith, Block, Searle, Seth) suggest that computers aren't made of the right kind of stuff to be conscious. Consciousness, they suggest, requires a biological substrate that computers lack. It's not always clear, however, exactly what property animal biologies have that computers lack or why that property matters. It helps, I think, to sort biological naturalism into two flavors. We can then consider what motivates each flavor and see why neither is entirely compelling. Two Flavors of Biological Naturalism Flavor One: Computers (at least those built along broadly familiar lines) cannot achieve some crucial type or degree of broad-brush functional or behavioral sophistication required for consciousness. Something -- such as having a metabolism, or being self-organizing in the right way, or having the right kinds of quantum configuration -- is both absent from foreseeable computer architectures and required for achieving some essential broad-brush…