IMO a very important question that we will face before too long is: "What is it like to be a computer?". As computers become more sophisticated in interaction and in their ability to learn, they are going to be increasingly recognized as independent actors rather than as simple machines. At that time we are going to have to start considering "the computer experience". I disagree. I don't think consciousness makes sense if defined as a a characteristic that something either has or doesn't. I think that anything that acts upon and reacts to its environment is conscious to a degree, including a cell. It might be an extremely simple form of consciouness, but I would argue that consciousness is a scalar. An ameoba's shred of consciousness is more recognizeable than that of a cell in our body because it can move, which is a shared characteristic of the nature of our consciounesses.Church is sort of cheating the philosophical question raised by Nagel in this example because, of course, a cell is not conscious.
I couldn't agree more with your comment re: computers. I have spent a considerable amount of time over the past few months wondering what it is like to be Watson. In my podcast with b_b I stated that Watson was not conscious. Is it wrong of me to just assume that? Either way, computer consciousness will be one of the big intellectual debates of coming decades. And regarding cell consciousness, I think I'll stand by what I said. When I said Church was cheating, I really meant that he didn't get at what it was like to be a cell... he just described it's function and behaviour. Nagel did that with bats but still didn't understand what it was like to be a bat.
It's possible. I do tend to believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of complexity. At the moment I am biased towards organisms with brains, but I think b_b would probably side with you.
I agree completely that a cell does experience a form of consciousness.
I'm stealing and mildly editing this from (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/) because it's 3AM and I'm shattered. "Block asks us to suppose that a billion Chinese people are each given a two-way radio with which to communicate with one another and with an artificial (brainless) body. The movements of the body are controlled by the radio signals, and the signals themselves are made in accordance with instructions the Chinese people receive from a vast display in the sky which is visible to all of them. The instructions are such that the participating Chinese people function like individual neurons, and the radio links like synapses, so that together the Chinese people duplicate the causal organization of a human brain. Whether or not this system, if it were ever actualized, would actually undergo any feelings and experiences, it seems coherent to suppose that it might not. " We might consider that it does. The Chinese-Body problem is similar to a cell experiencing a form of consciousness in some manner. I see no problem that if a human that is made up of cells experiences consciousness, there is a sense of consciousness in a singular cell.