In a post-human world of self-maintaining unconscious computers, some algorithms might be programmed, even self-programmed, to compose music and to analyse its mathematical structure. However, no one would appreciate the music or understand the analyses. A computer, like a text book or a filing cabinet, contains information but neither knows nor understands it. Computers would exchange data but no single datum would retain either value or meaning.
Life, negative entropy, is a temporary, local byproduct of the entropic process. Consciousness is a more recent byproduct of natural selection. However, value and meaning exist only in the byproduct of the byproduct, not in the longer term unconscious processes.
Dataists, according to Harari, argue that consciousness is a biological algorithm and that computer processes are more efficient algorithms. No doubt. So conscious beings should use computers to compute. Meanwhile, only conscious beings are able to value experience and to understand meaning.
Poul Anderson both imagined post-organic intelligences as conscious and continued to value specifically human consciousness. A world without any organic consciousnesses and also containing only unconscious algorithms would be of value to no one.
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