if a brain can be simulated by any turing-complete system with enough memory, and a bunch of crabs can comprise a turing-complete system...can a bunch of crabs arranged properly into trillions of logic gates produce consciousness?
Yes, they can. And they actually do, in a sense. There was recently a thread on HN about lots of ants behaving as a one intelligent entity although a single ant is very dumb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7658551
The discussion 'evolved' into evolution (of systems). It's strange that this paper discusses computation also as evolution, but I'm not sure if they mean the same thing. I also suggested that human brain computes (or thinks) by 'simulating' evolution. In this case, your individual brain cells would be like those bunch of crabs, just doing their business and producing thoughts as a whole.
You seem pretty confident about that; how could you possibly know if a collection of crabs produces "consciousness"? That's not even the same sort of thing as ants dropping pheromones, which is trivial to model on a computer.
You seem pretty confident that you are conscious, but I've seen no conclusive evidence. How can a person possibly know if a collection of brain cells produces "consciousness"? What brain cells do is definitely not the same sort of thing as the inner life of my experience.
I think it's really interesting how a large chunk of people will reply to this question with "well of course", while another large chunk of people will see this question as proof that consciousness cannot be simulated.
(For what it's worth, I'm in the former camp. I think you'd need far more than trillions though.)
The first step is to answer a different question. What is consciousness? How do you determine whether or not a system is conscious? If you can answer this question the answer to your question is probably easy.
if a brain can be simulated by any turing-complete system with enough memory, and a bunch of crabs can comprise a turing-complete system...can a bunch of crabs arranged properly into trillions of logic gates produce consciousness?