Consciousness as Enacted

A rainstorm modeled in a computer does not produce water. The trivial truth carries the load of Thompson's entire argument about consciousness: modeling a process is categorically different from instantiating it. A simulation of consciousness — however accurate, however functionally indistinguishable from the real thing — is not conscious, for the same reason that a simulation of rain is not wet. Consciousness, on the enactive account, is a specific kind of doing: an enacting, a bringing-forth, a making-sense that requires a living organism in a way that cannot be circumvented by computational simulation. The claim is not that consciousness is made of something mysterious; the claim is that consciousness is a process, and the process is inseparable from the biological, environmental, and historical conditions through which it occurs.