It seems that all of the comparisons with computational systems are either not really true (the supposed sharp distinction between hardware and software depends on whether you're considering the system as a software engineer, a firmware engineer or a hardware engineer. Computer systems are embodied just as much as any biological creatures) or contingent - if it were regarded as essential to consciousness that an organism have a source of true randomness for example, then we would simply add such a source to our systems (assuming consciousness was something we actually wanted them to have).
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