Indeed.<p><pre><code>  That’s the content of consciousness, and it’s no longer a
  fundamental mystery. It’s information, and we know how to build 
  computers that process information.
</code></pre>
The fundamental error here is trying to explain <i>consciousness</i> through the concept of <i>information</i>. The thing is, <i>information</i> can&#x27;t be explained except by reference to consciousness. A physical entity X (e.g., a radio signal) might hold information for a conscious agent Y, but X doesn&#x27;t intrinsically hold information in the absence of an agent.<p>I know there&#x27;s a growing trend in modern physics to treat information as a real physical property, akin to matter or energy, but I hold that this is a category error, akin to treating &quot;risk&quot; as something you measure in the world, rather than a measurement of your own uncertainty about a situation. They&#x27;re both examples of the Mind Projection Fallacy, projecting properties properly belonging to the mind out into the world.<p>Dualism gets a bad rap, but you can posit a non-religious form of dualism, whereby matter &amp; consciousness are both natural elements of the universe, but possessing different properties. Perhaps future science will be able to explain their relationship in more detail.<p>Attempting to dismiss consciousness, on the other hand, by taking monist reductionism as axiomatic (everything is matter, consciousness isn&#x27;t real), end up with the proponents attributing properties of consciousness to matter, and ultimately flopping back over into monist idealism (everything is consciousness) and precisely the mysticism they were trying to avoid.