Hi Meatbot – are you familiar with functionalism? It was a concept initiated by Putnam back in the 60’s.
Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, their causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Since mental states are identified by a functional role, they are said to be multiply realizable; in other words, they are able to be manifested in various systems, even perhaps computers, so long as the system performs the appropriate functions. While functionalism has its advantages, there have been several arguments against it, claiming that it is an insufficient account of the mind.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_mind)"
So yes, the proposal for a mechanical consciousness per your OP is often believed to have mental states per functionalism.
Meatbot said: Who is to say that a rock is not in some way minimally conscious? It has signals that propagate through the vibration of atoms. The atoms respond to each other's vibration. It can take input from vibration of the rock, and from temperature changes. It can change it's structure by melting. This is obviously different from what the brain does, but is it different enough that it's not conscious? I don't know.
Putnam has since written a book, “Representation and Reality” (1988) in which he does a 180 and decides functionalism is false, and therefore computationalism fails. In the appendix of his book, he makes the often quoted statement, “Every ordinary open system is a realization of every abstract finite automaton.” This argument basically proves that even a rock can have conscious mental states for exactly the points you make. Putnam points out that such states as are in a rock are purely symbolic and arbitrarily chosen, which is obviously correct and accepted by the most ardent computationalists like Dennett and Chalmers.
To defend computationalism, Chalmers wrote a paper entitled, “Does a Rock Implement Every Finite-State Automaton” (can be found online). Similar attacks on Putnam’s argument were done by Copeland, Christly and Endicott.
In Putnam’s defense, Bishop wrote numerous papers which strongly support Putnam’s view, as did a philosopher named Maudlin.
There are similar attacks on computationalism by Harnad who points out that computationalism is symbol manipulation and he comes up with an argument called “the Symbol Grounding problem”. Searle also attacks computationalism by noting that computations are not intrinsic to physics.
Personally, I have to agree with the anti-computationalists. The biggest problem right now with any computational view is simply defining “computation”. What is a computation? The most brilliant minds in philosophy have thus far failed to produce an adequate definition that shows how a computer can be intrinsic to anything physical in nature.