Dennis Hackethal’s Comments

Justin significantly contributed to Elliot’s underestimating me, eg by suggesting back in 2020 in their Discord chat that I was lying about having hired a lawyer when Elliot accused me of plagiarism and DOS.

Elliot seemed positively befuddled that I hired lawyers again last year to defend myself against his defamation. He specifically brought up my having paid for lawyers in his correspondence with them.

It’s presumably because he underestimated me that he spoke freely about things that gave me an advantage knowing and carelessly provided plenty of evidence to use against him, eg in his YouTube video about me. (Elliot’s video, not Justin’s, but Justin also provided lots of evidence without realizing.)

I took that screenshot right after I submitted the comment. Immediately thereafter, I refreshed the page to see if the comment was showing. It was. Now it’s gone.

About an hour and 45 minutes ago, I commented on Justin Mallone’s video:

7:15 Regarding Elliot’s defamatory denial-of-service (DOS) allegation, which you are spreading with this nasty video, your viewers should know that you are a dishonest communicator. You were in Elliot’s public chatroom, where you saw his announcement of his upcoming blog post before he posted it. In that chat, on 2020-04-01, two days before publication and the alleged DOS, you not only acknowledged Elliot’s announcement, but you also said you “may make a video where [you] go through this epic blog post of [his] and comment”. Here we are.

So you knew that Elliot was lying when he said he had contacted me “privately” about the blog post, implying that only I or someone I told could have known about it in advance and had motive to DOS his blog. You’ve known about his lie all these years, yet I’m not aware you’ve ever said anything. Instead, you have been relying on me not having read those chat logs, and you reinforce his lie when you call the timing of the alleged DOS “one hell of a coincidence”.

Stop peddling libel. Take this video down now and disown Elliot’s lie or I will consider you complicit.

58:30 Ironic how you’re ‘plagiarizing’ Ayn Rand regarding prestige, a “desire for the unearned”, being “at war with reality”, etc. You agree with Elliot (1:00:54) about removing ‘plagiarized’ content. Sounds like you need to do the same unless you want to be “knowingly and intentionally a plagiarist” of Rand’s ideas (and a hypocrite). More reason for you to take this video down. On that note, I wonder how well your blog would fare if people went over your articles with a fine-tooth comb…

On my blog, you will find an almost 27,000-word exposé proving, among many other things, Elliot’s lies and hypocrisy. You’re mentioned in it, too. The exposé also contains a no-contact request that applies to you along with all of Elliot’s associates. Your viewers should know that you recorded this video in defense of someone who not only doesn’t adhere to the standards he claims I violated (just like you proved that you don’t adhere to them either), but he had also repeatedly verbally abused his former mentor, invaded mine and others’ privacy, and publicly shamed people for leaving his toxic forum. That’s who you’re defending here. Viewers will find all the evidence in my exposé – just google my name.

My lawyers are keeping an eye on you.

This comment has since disappeared.

Assuming Discord cuts off seconds, then best case it’s 7:32:59.999 repeated - 7:25:00, which is 8.

The sanctioning of force can manifest in strange ways. Consider adults who, looking back, are 'glad' their parents coerced them when they were children. For example, they may claim to be glad their parents forced them to learn to play the piano – I've heard this surprisingly often. They argue they would have never learned otherwise, or the skill later translated into other useful areas in life, or whatever. In such cases, it is implicitly argued that it 'wasn't really' force because it was later deemed beneficial. The victim retroactively sanctions the force. But of course it was still force because there was no regard for the child's consent at the time the force was exerted.

From ‘Is Sanctioned Force Still Force?’

Popper continues:

A scientific theory may be true in the sense of absolute truth […].

Doesn’t get any clearer than that. People can reach and speak truth.

Here’s another Popper quote (emphasis mine):

[T]here is absolute truth, but unfortunately, we often don’t know whether what we’ve said is really true even when we state the truth.

Clearly, Popper thought it was possible to state the truth. He doesn’t even say we never know whether we’ve stated the truth, he only says we “often” don’t know.

Re #631. You wrote:

[Weinstein] has since explained he [put the footnote describing his paper as a work of entertainment] to ensure academic vampires would not try to suck all the blood out of it, by shunning academic peer review and copyrighting his work so that he maintains control over its progress.

Not a lawyer but I'm not sure someone else could copyright text for him. Or maybe I don't know enough about academia. Regardless, the goal you mention is compatible with intentional obscurantism.

Maybe they meant Weinstein shunned academic peer review and copyrighted his own paper. (I think copyright is automatic but again, not a lawyer, what do I know.)

I have redacted the remainder of #631 because if you're going to make claims that potentially harm people's reputation you better provide a source for each claim.

Upon consulting an attorney, I have removed the redaction and restored that comment to its original submission.

An example of close reading gone wrong from Ayn Rand’s ‘The Cult of Moral Grayness’:

One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture, is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: “There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.”

This is asserted in regard to persons, actions, principles of conduct, and morality in general. “Black and white,” in this context, means “good and evil.” (The reverse order used in that catch phrase is interesting psychologically.)

This reverse order isn’t this deep insight Rand implies it is. It could just as well not meaning anything at all. ‘Black and white’ and ‘good and evil’ are pre-existing phrases that would sound weird if you reversed the order to ‘white and black’ or ‘evil and good’. That doesn’t mean people make some accidental confession by mapping ‘white’ onto ‘evil’ and ‘black’ onto ‘good’ just because they keep the standard order of two standard phrases. Not to mention that she used those two phrases – it’s not even like this is a quote from someone else.

The customer can take his complaint to an independent court. If he prevails, an enforcement agency hired by the judge can enforce the ruling.

Note that the question isn’t just who will enforce the contract but also what. As Logan and I wrote:

[T]he parties may have purchased insurance that covers whatever conflict they now find themselves in. In that case, the insurance agencies, if different, have an interest in resolving the dispute such that both of their reputations remain intact. Should either insurance agency refuse to pay out/cover the damages, no one would trust them enough to do business with them ever again.

The enforcement mechanism described here is the discipline of constant dealings, as David Friedman explains. Repeat players have an incentive to honor their agreements. In addition, moral people will honor their agreements as a matter of principle. As a result, honesty is cheaper than dishonesty.

More generally put, I see no reason that a dispute between a customer and his enforcement agency wouldn’t follow the same logic as other disputes.

1. All ideas are false.
2. Bullet 1 is an idea.
3. Therefore, bullet 1 is false.

A contradiction. So not all ideas are false.

Another name for Caplan’s metaphysical mistake: pessimism.

Caplan makes a metaphysical mistake, a variation of the malevolent-universe premise: he thinks we live in a world where at some point in your life you have to do some minimum amount of toil to get what you want. That there is some law of nature that causes coercion.

That isn’t true. We don’t live in that world. It’s possible and desirable to enjoy every second of your life. We don’t currently know how to do that but it’s still possible in principle. And regardless, there’s no minimum amount of toil anyone has to go through.

His epistemological and moral mistakes are downstream of his metaphysical mistake:

Metaphysics ⇝ epistemology ⇝ morals

Like, if we lived in a world with some minimum required toil, then some things and some knowledge (he thinks knowledge of math specifically but it really doesn’t matter which) would only be achievable by coercion, ie self-coercion or external coercion, and if the child won’t coerce himself, then to save him from the worse result of not going through coercion (reduced career choices or whatever), as a ‘caring’ parent, Caplan would rather coerce his child and take on that guilt.

It’s not even true that you necessarily have fewer career choices if you don’t learn math. If your problem situation never requires math, and you keep solving your own problems, you still end up creating a lot of knowledge that opens doors for you that math might not have opened for you. You could open more doors that way than math would open for you.

A lot of mistakes follow automatically if you have the wrong metaphysics.

Writing this article reminded me of a situation I found myself in years ago. Not even sure I knew of TCS at the time. I was having dinner with a friend, his wife, and his two sons at their house. The older son was maybe 15 and was slowly beginning to think about his future after high school. The dad, my friend, said his son had to get a master’s degree – that was non negotiable. I still kick myself sometimes for not asking the son whether that’s what he wanted, too.

See also Ayn Rand’s thoughts re capital punishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMnLR3UTD1U&t=129s

That reminds me, I once saw female dog trying to hump a male dog.

Somebody shared this video of a dog basically humping the air: https://x.com/pho_lil/status/1836042271491309836

Cat doesn’t recognize owner anymore after owner gets haircut: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAA4BMgNa-G/

Cat thinks Lego structure is another cat: https://www.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/1fg0435/can_someone_translate/

Dog kicks itself, gets ‘mad’/‘confused’: https://www.reddit.com/r/awwtf/comments/1fgghgi/who_kicked_him/

Cat ‘uses’ missing arm to hit other cats: https://www.reddit.com/r/funnycats/comments/1fgd667/this_is_instinct/

Loved this article. […]

Thanks.

Genes wouldn’t be favored at roughly the rate of deleterious mutations because most genes don’t code for learnable knowledge.

I think you mean creativity (or, more precisely, the genes coding for it) wouldn’t be favored and so on.

For example, you can’t learn to control the metabolic processes of your liver.

It’s true that most genes (in humans at least) don’t code for learnable knowledge, but creativity can make up for some physical shortcomings, too: if your genes give you a faulty leg, say, you can use your creativity to make a cane.

Having said that, you make a fair point. I’ve revised the article to be more specific about which mutations creativity can make up for. (I think one could control the metabolic processes of one’s liver by creating and taking the right medicine, but early humans obviously didn’t have that knowledge.)

Skipping some, you write:

The 20,000 number is genes in the sense of genetics, that is - DNA that codes for proteins.

Teslo spoke of “30,000-35,000 genes”, not 20,000.

Regarding the rest of your comment, epistemology also predicts that humans have more junk in their genes (in the neo-Darwinian sense) than any other species. And I could see missing or faulty protein synthesis leading to behavioral errors which creativity can then make up for. But I’ve edited the post to reflect the distinction you mention.

Case in point, woman gets physical with ex husband, then falsely accuses him of raping her so her boyfriend doesn’t realize her infidelity: https://x.com/ogunski/status/1826080126708125741

This cat has the exact same meowing pattern on three occasions: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-41ee_JXup/

The video even calls the cat an ‘NPC’ (non-playable character, ie dumb video-game AI, which often makes the exact same utterances):

When your cat is actually an NPC and he tries to offer you the same side quest every single time you walk to his area of the map.

It’s a joke but shouldn’t be.

Here’s Naval pandering to mystics:

Science and spirituality are both the search for truth.

Gross. I’ve gotten ‘guru’ vibes (metaphor!) from Naval before. I don’t know why Deutsch associates with someone like that.

If they were spontaneous enough to create the conditions for themselves, than that’s exactly the situation where what you call “the leakage problem” is present.

I don’t think so. The leakage problem refers to a situation where a knowledge-laden entity (eg, a person) puts knowledge in some other entity and observers then mistake the mere presence and exhibition of said knowledge for genuine knowledge creation on the part of that second entity. The second entity did not create knowledge, it merely inherited it, yet this inheritance goes unnoticed and is mistaken for creation.

A spontaneous process, by definition, is not knowledge-laden, thus there can be no leakage of knowledge there.

Yes, but in an attempt to discover the origin of life the point of making the conditions such that life arises “reliably” is simply to say that such conditions have a probability of arising that’s on par with constraints like time, available materials at the time, etc.

I think scientists would shoot for probability 1 (or very close to 1).

That completes the how it could’ve happened explanation.

That mode, again, is no better than RNA world. (Though that is good.)

Don’t see any philosophical problem there.

Because you’re not addressing the leakage problem. That’s related but not the same.

 The first bit of knowledge creation, by definition, had to have happened by chance.

Not necessarily. There could be spontaneous processes that reliably kick off knowledge-creating processes. That would also solve the leakage problem.

Scientists like reproducibility. And what you describe is pretty much what we already have with things like RNA world except some details are missing.

Also, consider other origin-of-knowledge events such as creativity: every newborn has it, reliably & predictably (unless there are certain birth defects), yet it’s still genuine knowledge creation.

There remains the question if the currently discussed world models of physics […] already covers all of physical reality - apart from the problem that those theories are still awaiting a unification.

Not a physicist but I doubt they cover all of physical reality in the sense that they’re some ‘ultimate’ explanation. Even our best theories are always going to have shortcomings. That includes theories we come up with after the unification you mention. There’s never a guarantee that tomorrow we won’t find some new aspect of physical reality which our best theories do not yet cover.

[T]he stance “consciousness can be fully explained by the underlying physics as we know it” is of course possible, but there are others […]. What do you think about this?

Consciousness is always the result of a physical process. But that in itself doesn’t explain consciousness. Any viable explanation of consciousness will let us program it on a computer.

Maybe the question should be phrased: ‘Should there be a process of relieving children from their bad parents?’

To which my answer is: absolutely, yes, assuming the children of bad parents want to be relieved.

Screenshots and more details here.

My answer was predictably deleted today by moderator Rory Alsop, who has a history of doing that. “Dennis - this post does not answer the question. Once again, I must remind you that Answer posts must answer the question.”

My answer does answer the question, just not in a way that doesn’t question OP’s alleged infallibility as a parent.

Does Rory think that, when a question is based on false premises, one should just pretend the premises are true? Apparently. He deleted another answer of mine and commented: “Frame challenges are not welcome here.”

I think traditional female culture has done even more harm to women.

Explain what you think traditional female culture is?

AS has since misquoted again: http://www.quote-checker.com/diffs/atlas-society-misquotes-cameron-winklevoss

Diffs for two of the mentioned misquotes can be found here:

• David Deutsch misquotes Pericles
• David Deutsch misquotes Richard Dawkins

Arguably, the link between explaining and controlling reality is also an objectivist insight.

In short, you're suggesting the reason for his incomprehensible style of communication is not obscurantism but social incompetence?

Keep your response short.

Uncompetative,

Re #627. I like when people catch misquotes, but you technically misquoted Witten yourself. You replaced a hyphen with a space. Not sure how that happened – did you not copy/paste the quote?

Re #629. You wrote:

He can’t be vague and imprecise in order to ensure the layperson is not left behind.

He's going to have to find some solution if he wants to address laymen. He could explain the terms. For example, as a software engineer, when I speak to laymen about programming, I either explain the terms or use analogies they will understand. I can 'dumb things down' just enough without compromising on accuracy. And if I do want to talk about more advanced programming topics, I don't address laymen. Because they're laymen.

Popper's and Feynman's books are great examples of how to speak to laymen on complex issues without compromising on quality.

[T]he academic pay-wall limits what papers he is able to read in his spare time.

Not sure how big an obstacle this could present to someone like Weinstein.

Re #630. You wrote:

Eric Weinstein has stated he considers those in the Portal community to be his friends and not fans.

Friends can be fans. And not all of the hundreds of thousands views and listens he gets online are from the Portal community. Even if all of the people in the Portal community were smart enough to parse his statements, most others in the general populace aren't.

Public intellectuals shouldn't rely on others to parse their statements for them. They are responsible for making themselves intelligible. Consider this quote by Ayn Rand:

In public speeches and print, [the argument from intimidation] flourishes in the form of long, involved, elaborate structures of unintelligible verbiage, which convey nothing clearly except a moral threat. (“Only the primitive-minded can fail to realize that clarity is oversimplification.”)

You made that same moral threat when you accused me of being on the intellectual level of a toddler ("I am sure you can find a Cocomelon video which is more your speed."). That kind of threat doesn't impress me, but it does many others, and it's exactly the kind of tactic Weinstein and his fans, including you, evidently rely upon to spread his ideas.

Re #631. You wrote:

[Weinstein] has since explained he [put the footnote describing his paper as a work of entertainment] to ensure academic vampires would not try to suck all the blood out of it, by shunning academic peer review and copyrighting his work so that he maintains control over its progress.

Not a lawyer but I'm not sure someone else could copyright text for him. Or maybe I don't know enough about academia. Regardless, the goal you mention is compatible with intentional obscurantism.

I have redacted the remainder of #631 because if you're going to make claims that potentially harm people's reputation you better provide a source for each claim.

Re #632. You wrote:

So, you complain about not understanding his answer after omitting 122 words out of 161. That’s 75% of his answer. Gone. No wonder you can’t make sense out of it.

I've read the added context and I think it does little to aid in understanding him. It also makes a new point, which only adds to the complexity of what he's saying.

It's been a while since I quoted that passage so I don't remember what was going through my mind at the time but I'm a conscientious quoter. I don't leave out stuff to misrepresent people.

Her comment that her cat isn't touching her clothes is false, though: she said her cat kneads the air when she picks it up, so her cat is still touching her clothes, or at least her skin, which is also soft (if not with its paws then with other parts of its body).

She thought she disproved my point because the cat kneads the air, ie its paws aren't touching her clothes.

The only point that potentially disproved mine was that the cat 'kneads' hardwood and tiles – assuming it does so when not touching anything soft with any part of its body.

sopheannn wrote:

the cat isn’t touching my clothes? bro has never owned a cat obviously. they’ve done it on hardwood and tile before too

This isn't bad. Like, it still doesn't make sense for cats to 'knead' things that can't be kneaded, but what she suggests may refute my original claim that soft materials trigger kneading because they're reminiscent of a mother's belly.

Or maybe her cat is particularly buggy. In any case, something like my explanation will be true – there's some automatic trigger of kneading that cats execute uncritically, ie like robots.

The reason the original video reached for a humanizing explanation along the lines of cats feeling “safe” or “content” is that the creators don't consider that cats are robots. Uncritically kneading things that can't be kneaded (air, hardwood, tile) is still robotic behavior.

It just occurred to me that crypto-fallibilists are like 'vegans' who eat meat once in a while but then lie to themselves and still think they're vegans.

It's fine to try being vegan and fail at it. But don't lie to yourself about your failure just so you can keep that unearned title. Maybe try being vegan on Mondays only, and once you're pretty good at that, add Fridays, and so on. But as a matter of simple logic, you're not a vegan unless you don't consume any animal products, on any day of the week.

It's the same with fallibilism, only harder, because changing one's ways of thinking is harder than changing one's diet. You're not a fallibilist if you won't consider that someone else could be right and you wrong even once. It then takes time to earn the title of 'fallibilist' again. You don't lose it forever over a single mistake, or even a dozen mistakes, but you do have to try anew after each mistake.

But it's not about titles, that's surface-level stuff. It's about logic. A vegan is someone who never eats animal products. A fallibilist is someone who is always willing to consider that he could be wrong.

Like veganism, fallibilism, by definition, is indivisible and can't make room for any compromises. This indivisibility leaves no room for lies or evasions, and I guess that that is why some of those cryptos who want the unearned title of 'fallibilist' deride my stance as 'purity testing'.

You figured right; let's conclude the discussion with an impasse due to insufficient interest on both sides (though for different reasons).

Why have you stopped discussing?

[Dennis:] First, please explain when consciousness must have an effect on information processing and when it can’t. Otherwise it’s too hand wavy to work as a counter refutation.

[Kieren:] My theory doesn’t answer this question yet. Does your theory?

I don't think it matters cuz I'm not currently trying to counter refute my own refutation :)

Again, if you have an example of an explanation that says something that conflicts with my theory of consciousness, then provide it.

My original refutation?

[Dennis:] Third, you say that “[c]onsciousness is created as a result of information processing.” All information processing?

[Kieren:] The deepest I have conjectured is that it is the process of self referential modeling.

Which calculators don't have, right? In which case calculators aren't conscious after all.

Which refutation are you referring to here? And how does it conflict?

#599. It conflicts because my refutation showed by invoking modus tollens etc. that calculators are not conscious.

I'm not saying he was. James Taggart wasn't obligated to agree to a contract, nor is Deutsch obligated to write a textbook on quantum physics. That's not the point.

PS: Thinking more about this, overall, I can see that your claim that 'calculators are conscious after all; our best explanations of them just didn't need to mention consciousness' conflicts with my refutation, but why should we break symmetry in favor of the former and not the latter? It seems to me that it's not really a counter refutation unless it explains that, too.

Consciousness is created as a result of information processing. It does not necessarily have any effect on the information processing.

First, please explain when consciousness must have an effect on information processing and when it can't. Otherwise it's too hand wavy to work as a counter refutation. (And even then such an explanation is only necessary but maybe not sufficient, I'll have to think more about it.)

Second, you seem to be saying that the only reason consciousness would figure into our best explanations of calculators is if consciousness had an effect on information processing. Why must that be the case? Why couldn't consciousness figure into our best explanations of calculators for other reasons, despite not having any effect?

Third, you say that "[c]onsciousness is created as a result of information processing." All information processing?

The only explanation about animals that would change would be the ones that have something to do with their consciousness (if with [sic] had any at all). E.g. the horse bucks and neighs when it experiences pain. Existing explanations about how the animals [sic] muscles, organs, and neurons function would not change. Likewise for the calculator, only those explanations that have something to do with calculator consciousness would change.

Of course, if you divvy them up into those explanations that have something to do with consciousness and those that do not, then only some of them are going to change. But for animals/calculators as a whole, the explanations would change. (Imagine how much our explanations of humans would change if we learned that humans are not conscious! We wouldn't then say 'but explanations of our muscles remained the same'.) In a related context, you wanted me to "consider all of our current best theories, not a subset", ie have a holistic picture – now you want me to consider only subsets of theories about calculators.

None of these explanations [about calculators] conflict with my theory of consciousness, because they don’t say anything about consciousness.

The fact that none of our explanations of calculators say anything about conscious is the very reason you should think they're not conscious. And again, the four concepts from our background knowledge taken together do show that calculators really aren't conscious, and then they do conflict with your theory of consciousness because it predicts that calculators are conscious.

Note that this is not an explanation about calculator consciousness, but instead a general theory of consciousness that implies that calculators may be conscious.

Again, I suggest phrasing things in more absolute terms such as 'must', 'cannot' etc. If calculators may be conscious it's too easy to evade criticism. If you're going to constrain it, specify under which conditions calculators must be conscious and why and under which conditions they cannot be conscious and why not.

But yes, I believe I understand your point here: you're saying our explanations of the operation of calculators, their hardware, and so on would not change. However, I do think that, if we had a working theory of consciousness that implied that even calculators are conscious, people would get busy trying to understand what it is about calculators that makes them conscious and then amend our explanations of calculators as a whole accordingly, at the very least by adding an implicit reference to such a working theory of consciousness.

Can you provide me with an existing explanation of calculators that conflicts (would need changing) with the implication that calculators might be conscious? The only explanation I can think of is the theory of consciousness (the thing under question).

I think any explanation of calculators as a whole would need to be amended to include how their functionality gives rise to consciousness, at least by implicitly referencing your theory of consciousness. I don't know in detail what our current explanation of calculators looks like – I don't manufacture calculators; I would just refer to higher level concepts such as basic arithmetic on a programming level – but I do know that that explanation doesn't currently speak of consciousness, or else it would be commonly thought that calculators are conscious. I also don't know in detail what the amendment would look like since I don't know how consciousness works. Of course, tautologically, the sub explanations that don't have to do with consciousness aren't going to need to change, not even by implicit reference. (Note that this is another reason I don't find neuroscience promising when it comes to the brain; presumably, explanations of wouldn't change.)

Please provide a counter-refutation to my refutation. Otherwise, I think it's likely that we're going to reach an impasse. If you're not sure yet how to refute it, asking questions about it or steelmanning it could be a good way forward.

PS: Re when you wrote:

An explanation is not refuted at the moment it is conjectured simply because it has implications that are not implied by any existing explanations.

To be clear, it's not just that existing explanations do not imply calculator consciousness (although that would be enough of a challenge) – together, the four pieces of background knowledge I've referenced rule out calculator consciousness.

An explanation is not refuted at the moment it is conjectured simply because it has implications that are not implied by any existing explanations.

Agreed. That just means there's a conflict; an opportunity to break symmetry.

Imagine scientists first conjecturing theories involving charged particles to explain aspects of electricity. Surely you don’t think these theories are refuted because charged particles don’t figure into any of our existing explanations?

Correct, I do not. But, per Popper, new theories should explain, at least implicitly, why their predecessors are wrong. Which is what I've suggested as one of the four attack vectors: you could explain why our explanations of calculators are wrong; why they don't imply the absence of consciousness (which you seem to attempt below anyway in your remark about calculator operations). That way, you would break symmetry in favor of the prediction that calculators are (or at least might be) conscious, and then modus tollens doesn't rule out anymore that non-creative algorithms create consciousness.

If it were true that the algorithmic processing occurring within a calculator was sufficient to create some kind of conscious experience, why would it be necessary for such a consciousness to have any effect on the operation of the calculator?

If you're repeating that our explanations (not just operations) of calculators need not change if calculators are conscious, then I repeat that you then also shouldn't think our explanations of animals should change if they are (or aren't) conscious. But it seems that you do want them to change in the case of animals. And you also want them to change in the case of the human brain (where you don't restrict yourself just to operations but want neuroscience to explain how those operations result in consciousness, and such an explanation would then form part of the explanation of the brain). So, if only for consistency – but also in an attempt to understand reality – you should want them to change when it comes to calculators, too.

It sounds like you have a somewhat instrumentalist view of explanations (when it suits you), which leads you to reduce explanations of calculators to a description of their operations only. But that isn't a valid way around my application of the modus tollens.