Hope this ramble doesnt seem too incoherent.

 

Yes, this type of example is interesting. Gets to the intuition that what is important for consciousness is relational or functional aspects which can be reproduced in unintuitive ways. We think of our conscious needing to work in a rapid way where neurons excite each other in succession almost instantly and computations in different parts of the brain are happening simultaneously. I always get torn because as long as the functional relationships between your units are preserved, then why shouldn't the drawing examplle be conscious.. it would definitely act like it to some perspective where it would produce behaviours like any other conscious being... just on a very slow timescale. Moreover, surely its plausible to suggest that our consciousness is quite slow in the context of the physical mechanisms that must support it.. when you think about all of the chemical processes that have to happen, the travelling that ions and neurotransmitters have to do, transportation of vesicles and receptors, other processes involved in energy metabolism. All of these convoluted processes support our consciousness on a very fast timescale just like the paper and hand that is writing out the equations. Seems like as long as no limitations on fundamental physics have been violated, there is a degree that the temporal scale giving the speed which things happen is kind of relative.
 

Then again because we percieve our consciousness as a kind of integrated intrinsic whole, its hard to imagine the drawing example having phenomenal consciousness with all the implied time lags of writing things... even though this kind of happens to us on a smaller scale in some sense.

 

What if you did all the equations sequentially though so that you just did each calculation and drawing and rubbed it out instantly then did the next one... instead of having a 2d map out in front of you... it would behave in the same way computationally but none of the states would actually exist simultaneously... that's a hard one for me.

 

Another interesting point is that that computational drawing if it is like a human brain will end up, with the right inputs, professing its own consciousness. which brings up redundancy in dualistic views of consciousness... why do i need to posit separate phenomenal consciousness to the brain if a person's beliefs about being consciousness have nothing to do with some phenomenal conscious and are causally everything to do with brain computations, so much so that a drawing will profess consciousness by the exact same mechanisms... it would make phenomenal consciousness seem epiphenomenal which many people find undesirable. it makes it increasongly difficult to distinguish myself from the 2d paper as being somehow more conscious or that there needs to be a unique phenomenal ontology to explain my consciousness as opposed to brain mechanisms or whatever.