I know I'm ignored, but I want to conclude some stuff for myself.
Recompile, you have these (questionable) initial assumptions:

• You can experience and measure other consciousnesses directly (which is impossible which was already pointed out, only behaviour can be examined)
  
• Consciousness is a boolean thing (I pointed out that even this is questionable. How about early childhood memories? Dreams? Drugs?)
  
• Other complex (animals/planets/whatever) systems don't have it (as already pointed out, this is questionable, due to the first point)
  
• Epiphenomenalism and the subjective experience of consciousness somehow contradicts causality
  

Please correct me if I'm wrong or shoot me down if I'm just a retard troll

Again, I'm not saying anything of the sort [that consciousness isn't created by the body]

To paraphrase:
mdwh: consciousness arises out of the complexity of a large number of smaller simpler parts.
recompile: that belief lacks grounding. there is no reason to believe that it is the case the consciousness arises from a complex system.
It seems as if you're trying to refute that consciousness doesn't arise from the complex interactions of smaller parts?

If it's not caused by something within the body, then it must be caused by something external to it. (That's too easy.)

And now it seems you're directly refuting that consciousness is created by the body, and maybe it's just magic?

That's not what I said at all. Also, reading the rest of the quote, I looks like you've misunderstood the term 'determinism'.

You said we "cannot simulate the universe on a computer as a computer is a deterministic system and the universe is not". I was clarifying that non-deterministic rule sets can still be simulated on a computer.
I understand determinism and that the universe may be non-deterministic. The thing is that at a high level, the universe does appear deterministic. Given a high level description of an object, it will behave in the same way, mostly. At a lower level, the universe appears probabilistic. You can still simulate such a universe on a deterministic computer, assuming you take all of the possibilities into account. If given a description of an object, there are 10 possible outcomes, then you can branch the state of your simulation and determine what will happen next for each of those outcomes. This will lead to 10 more events, each of which cause 10 more splits, so now you've got 100 copies of your simulation. In reality the number of splits is infinite, not 10, but the same theory applies.
In practice, it is actually possible to take all infinity probabilities into account calculate the n most likely outcomes to get results to what the desired accuracy is. We use these techniques to simulate reality already. So, today, we can simulate an extremely small part of the non-deterministic universe to some degree of error, e.g. telling you what the result will be 99.999% of the time. In theory, with infinite time and memory, you could determine all possible branches, making it possible to express a non-deterministic world by deterministic means.

Take some time with it.

Please stop being so sophomoric and maybe answer some questions people have had about your statements, instead of going off on vague tangents about things they didn't ask about.

I think I can see where this is heading. The philosophers will continue to debate consciousness to the omega point and beyond, while hobbyist and other professionals will advance AI and human mind augmentation to the point where all this is either very obvious or very irrelevant.

Again, I'm not advocating any position. Even against computationalism, the only position I admit to holding, I've not offered an argument. On epiphenomenalism, I've not giving an opinion, just briefly noted some problems with it and alluded to others.

I'm just trying to point out that the problem is incredibly difficult and there are no simple or easy answers. It's silly to make any sort of claim as to the nature of consciousness, let alone what you need to artificially create it! Absurd things like "it must be" type answers are not just uninteresting (they're implicit in the metaphysics, after all, and thus offer us nothing new), they're ultimately useless (they can't get us past "that" to "how").

Again, the problem is extraordinarily complicated. It's absurd to make any claims like "it must be that" or "requires only that".

Right. And since you haven't offered an argument against computationalism, your bold claim that "one thing we can be reasonably certain about, however, is that we can't create anything resembling consciousness by purely algorithmic means" was justifiably attacked. You have some background in philosophy, it seems, but not nearly enough basis to justify your generally smug attitude.

Just for fun:

Anything that's typically treated as non-deterministic can just as easily be expressed as something with hidden variables;

It turns out that this isn't true. See Bell.
[/quote]

No. This is an extremely common misconception, but it's still just that. From Wikipedia on Bell's theorem: "one is forced to reject either locality or realism (or both)." This is very different from saying "the universe is provably non-deterministic." As I said, the conclusion that the universe is not goverened by hidden variables rests on assumptions that the hidden variables have locality. It says nothing about hidden variables in a general sense; the universe can still be modeled with hidden variables as long as they don't manifest themselves in certain physical ways.

In fact, this is fairly easy to see: based on empirical data points alone, any model that proposes nondeterminism can be replaced with one that requires no such thing and yields the same data points. All you have to do is replace the source of nondeterminism with invisible-god and his invisible-book-of-random-numbers. As long as invisible-god and his book are not accessible to those collecting the data points, the two are indistinguishable based on those data points.

If consciousness appears to arise from a simulation at some point then we would have to count it as being truly conscious. How is our perception of our own consciousness any different? To you I appear conscious and to me, you appear conscious it isn't really a perfectly defined state. That said, the original post brought up how we would program hardware that was designed like a brain... I would guess something like Direct X11 compute shaders.