Is consciousness organic in nature?
There are a lot of hyponyms and their own specialized issues subsumed under the umbrella concept of "consciousness". For instance, John Searle contends that intentionality is dependent upon a biological substrate. However, if unlike experience / manifestation[3], whatever he means by "intentionality" boils down to the outward behavior / responses of an entity, and whatever internal system of micro-activity leads to that, then it seems that similar functional organization could be replicated by non-biological substrates. Perhaps not all the quasi-accidental aspects could be emulated that contribute to a biotic system (evolution outputs a messy governance for its progeny), but at least something artificially in the neighborhood.
In the course of addressing "information processing"[1] Searle does open the door to the quandary of how sub-categorical elements of consciousness are to be prevented from being universal (potentially leading to panprotopsychism, neutral monism, matter / energy having internal states, etc). This in turn can spur a reformulation of the "
Hard Problem" that better clarifies what the difficulty is with experience: Commonsense materialism prides itself in avoiding what it deems "craziness", but how can that be accomplished when it comes to those manifestations of extrospection and introspection? Especially when dissipation of any explanatory "craziness"[2] is harassed by two restrictions that together seem to negate any possibility of a solution: That _X_ can have no primitive precursors of itself to arise from and that there can be no brute emergence (the equivalent of magical conjuring).
In addition to Eric Schwitzgebel's example below, many would consider it crazy for qualitative experiences to be generated by the gear / pulley interactions of a purely mechanical computer; or even a hydraulic system that manipulated water with valves. This suggests we have an underlying bias for electrical operations (whether electronics or bio-electrochemical based). But the latter is just as bereft of physics asserting that it harbors manifestations as the interactions of the other agencies. And again, commonsense materialism wants to dodge that capacity being global to "stuff and actions", of even crude / random phenomenal events occurring across the broad world or cosmos [i.e., panprotoexperientialism].
A final resort -- the ascription of experience falling out of or being generated by a unique spatial and relational arrangement of working components -- is an appeal to such a formal scheme alone providing the extra causal power (independent of what physically instantiates it, beyond the limited powers of the latter). Accordingly it's the epitome of brute emergence, that a radical novelty can be conjured by regulated patterns (whether they be dance rituals, structured oscillations, chanted spells, live circuitry, interlocking parts, etc). Where here "radical" is short for the novelty being extremely unlike the affairs that preceded it / engendered it.
[1] John Searle:
The introduction of the notion of "information processing" therefore produces a dilemma: either we construe the notion of "information processing" in such a way that it implies intentionality as part of the process or we don't. If the former, then the programmed computer does not do information processing, it only manipulates formal symbols. If the latter, then, though the computer does information processing, it is only doing so in the sense in which adding machines, typewriters, stomachs, thermostats, rainstorms, and hurricanes do information processing; namely, they have a level of description at which we can describe them as taking information in at one end, transforming it, and producing information as output. But in this case it is up to outside observers to interpret the input and output as information in the ordinary sense. And no similarity is established between the computer and the brain in terms of any similarity of information processing. --
Minds, Brains, and Programs
[2] Eric Schwitzgebel:
It would be bizarre to suppose that the United States has a stream of conscious experience distinct from the conscious experiences of the people who compose it [...] Yet it’s unclear by what materialist standard the United States lacks consciousness. Nations, it would seem, represent and self-represent. They respond (semi-) intelligently and self- protectively, in a coordinated way, to opportunities and threats. They gather, store, and manipulate information. They show skillful attunement to environmental inputs in warring and spying on each other. Their subparts (people and subgroups of people) are massively informationally interconnected and mutually dependent, including in incredibly fancy self-regulating feedback loops. These are the kinds of capacities and structures that materialists typically regard as the heart of mentality.
Common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. Contradictions thus inevitably flow from it, and no coherent metaphysical system can respect it all. Although ordinary common sense serves us fairly well in practical maneuvers through the social and physical world, common sense has proven an unreliable guide in cosmology and probability theory and microphysics and neuroscience and macroeconomics and evolutionary biology and structural engineering and medicine and topology. If metaphysics more closely resembles items in the second class than in the first, as it seems to, we might excusably doubt the dependability of common sense as a guide to metaphysics [actually ontological issues, concerning whether matter / energy is odder than we believe or not].
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/CrazyMind-120116.pdf
[3] Erwin Schrodinger:
"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness? --
What is Life? Mind and Matter