The experiment is okay, it's actually a special case of a concept explored in Egan's Permutation City and your observation about what's really doing the work applies there too. Except story goes in unsettling directions by really taking noise generator aspect seriously. Things get interesting when sections of patterns become self interpreting.
A similar thing could be done for brains: record with necessary accuracy, all voltages, membrane potentials and any key biochemical concentrations. This will take a finite number of bits. Look for a decoding of recorded data from heated iron bar, convert those readings, instead of using original, and play that back into state clamped brain. Does being able to read conscious state into brains from hot iron invalidate them too?
Another relevant story is Wang's Carpets. We might look at some alien moss or fungal mat and think it primitive. But later our technologies and knowledge advance to the point we can now see it's running a complex computation with intelligent agents inhabiting. Did the creatures not exist until we could decode them?
One of its pivotal flaws is:
> Since there is no definition of computation without reference to an external observer, a system in isolation just cannot compute, which suggests that a conscious being cannot compute.
This is an assumption they do not try to and cannot prove. It's also what much of their argument rests upon.
Related ideas are subjectivity of emergence or what counts as an observer for Wigner's Friend.
A similar thing could be done for brains: record with necessary accuracy, all voltages, membrane potentials and any key biochemical concentrations. This will take a finite number of bits. Look for a decoding of recorded data from heated iron bar, convert those readings, instead of using original, and play that back into state clamped brain. Does being able to read conscious state into brains from hot iron invalidate them too?
Another relevant story is Wang's Carpets. We might look at some alien moss or fungal mat and think it primitive. But later our technologies and knowledge advance to the point we can now see it's running a complex computation with intelligent agents inhabiting. Did the creatures not exist until we could decode them?
One of its pivotal flaws is:
> Since there is no definition of computation without reference to an external observer, a system in isolation just cannot compute, which suggests that a conscious being cannot compute.
This is an assumption they do not try to and cannot prove. It's also what much of their argument rests upon.
Related ideas are subjectivity of emergence or what counts as an observer for Wigner's Friend.