I agree that it should not be dismissed as mumbo-jumbo, but I am not (at least at first sight) particularly impressed by it. It is an example of the long tradition of trying to identify an unbridgeable ontological divide between things that are conscious and things that compute digitally (or more specifically here, von Neumann computers.) As I regard ontologies as being little more than ways of relating what we think we know, I feel this is putting the ontic cart before the epistemic horse.
About half-way through, the author raises a terrible argument from Searle: a simulated rainstorm does not make you wet (to which I reply, a simulated Enigma machine really does encode and decode messages - which analogy is relevant here?) To his credit, he does not leave it at that: he follows up with (quoting Chalmers) "Hofstadter’s insight is that whether or not we recognize a simulated hurricane as a hurricane depends on our perspective. In particular, it depends on whether we’re experiencing the simulated hurricane from inside or outside the simulation."
He goes back-and-forth with this for another paragraph, until One could object that this criterion is too strong... That is, we should ask: can we upload the virtual agent to a robot in our level of reality? Of course, I do not have a knock-down argument against this reply. I can only say that the conscious beings we currently know are different, and that this difference might matter.
So here we end up with a very weak "well, maybe" - i.e. we don't know enough to be sure, which is where all arguments of this type that I have looked at so far (and are not simply begging the question) end up.
It’s interesting to consider whether a simulated rainstorm is in fact possible. Not a crude numerical simulation like those used for forecasting, but one fine-grained enough to accurately predict the trajectory of every drop.
You'll need to define your parameters a bit more. A simple model of each drop which gives a reasonable approximation of a rainstorm? Probably fairly possible, though far from trivial today (a rainstorm may have ~some trillions of raindrops. We can demonstrably simulate systems with an order of magnitude more parameters today, given simple enough rules). A simulation down to the quantum level of each fundamental particle in the rainstorm? In principle possible given enough time, in practice impossible as the computational requirements (absent quantum computers) are too great. And the 'in principle' is assuming that our understanding of physics at that level is accurate, which it may not be.
About half-way through, the author raises a terrible argument from Searle: a simulated rainstorm does not make you wet (to which I reply, a simulated Enigma machine really does encode and decode messages - which analogy is relevant here?) To his credit, he does not leave it at that: he follows up with (quoting Chalmers) "Hofstadter’s insight is that whether or not we recognize a simulated hurricane as a hurricane depends on our perspective. In particular, it depends on whether we’re experiencing the simulated hurricane from inside or outside the simulation."
He goes back-and-forth with this for another paragraph, until One could object that this criterion is too strong... That is, we should ask: can we upload the virtual agent to a robot in our level of reality? Of course, I do not have a knock-down argument against this reply. I can only say that the conscious beings we currently know are different, and that this difference might matter.
So here we end up with a very weak "well, maybe" - i.e. we don't know enough to be sure, which is where all arguments of this type that I have looked at so far (and are not simply begging the question) end up.