If you read the Reddit post there's no contradiction:

These are not people's email addresses and never were.

Wow, that's a tall claim. Especially that i it's slavery. IMO that undermines your credibility.

I thought of this as a counterargument but it does seem to track. The company decides how long it takes you to get to your desk. They may save money by making it slower (fewer and bigger buildings).

What about a company way down a corridor, with a slow lift? Do they need to pay for the time walking to the office? Why or why not? It seems like the same situation as the lengthy computer setup, if shorter.

This is not just for crazies. I think there's something deep in the human/animal psyche that wants to lash out when it feels trapped. Like a feline in a crate, I feel the impotent urge to claw my way out of Ikea mazes and shopping malls without clearly designated exits. If somebody blocked my path in one of those already antagonistically designed environments, the pressure to react would double.

Does that figure include amortized R&D, software development, and support costs? If not, the $500 price point is illusory.

Yeah, you could say that. On the other hand you could say the rewrite was an investment in maintainability--sacrificing immediate stability for a future of lack of memory issues and reduced possibility of control flow mistakes or type errors.

I'm afraid I insist. To give the main argument, we have not yet found an effect that does not follow physical causes. Speech about consciousness is caused by the physical universe--particles, electrical states, etc. Some intuition pumps are: a rule-based chatbot that doesn't pass the Turing test could discuss consciousness. If the concept is even coherent, a zombie would discuss its consciousness exactly as you and I are, despite having none. If someone sleep-talked or spoke while under the influence, they could utter low quality statements about consciousness while their consciousness was somewhere else, in effect doing the same thing a zombie would. "Lying" is a concept that depends on consciousness, but there are any number of ways a system can discuss consciousness in a way that does not agree with the actual fact. In particular we never discuss the current consciousness. Meditation (mostly noting) leads one to believe that ironically, people don't seem to "experience" most of their experience--one assumes it's because bleeding edge conscious experience is typically not stored, even in working memory.

2. I like the way you think, but I don't agree with your argument about consciousness manipulating reality. That's supposition, and if another being said its consciousness influenced its actions, you would have to take its word for it. That is no evidence. But if consciousness did not exert influence, conscious valence would not coincide so well with evolutionary needs (calories, sex). So consciousness that exerts influence in the direction of evolutionary fitness it selected for. I.e., the physical correlates are selected for, but it comes to the same thing. (At least this is my most recent thinking on the issue

Okay, but why is there something that it's like to be organized energy? Why does energy experience pleasure? Such a weird phenomenon deserves explanation.

I take it you think the concept of a zombie is incoherent--but I would ask why all that computation has an experience?

Alternatively, does every computation have qualia? If so, that may simplify the conversation but I don't think it resolves it.

You can't possibly think I'd reply to that tone? You're not entitled to my time.

Let me clarify. I mean consciousness as experience. Not thinking, not feeling, not memories, but the raw experience that is always happening here and now. When you used the word "perceive" I interpreted that as a tacit admission that experience does exist. It's the same for any quale: warmth, cold, anxiety, fear, desire. You can argue that they represent facets of computation but you would not deny that you feel them. They are real for you. Why is that? Is 4 real for a calculator like friction on my skin is real to me? Thomas Nagel asked, "What's it like to be a bat?" Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F).

The idea of an illusion of consciousness implies that there is consciousness. Without consciousness, there would be no illusion.

That's true, but it goes even further. There's no such thing as international law. There is only other countries' laws, treaties, and conventions. No sovereign nation willingly subjects itself to another nation's laws, for that is giving up some of its sovereignty.

I'm interested in where this line of thinking leads because I'm unsatisfied with all the current thinking about consciousness. I'm not gonna write three essays here, but I feel there are some arguments that: consciousness does not necessarily arise from physical matter (though practically speaking it does seem to), consciousness influences physical reality (this is from an argument about why conscious valence so closely matches evolutionarily adaptiveness), and that there's not a really solid argument that a human is conscious but a rock or a city isn't (because there isn't a place you can draw the line).

If physical reality is reality, consciousness breaks all the rules. I'm eager to hear other theories with more explanatory power.