It's too bad that movie was kinda lame. But the idea is not. If one is a functionalist about mental states, including consciousness, then one believes that our mental states can be instantiated in any system that has the same functional roles as the functional states in our brain that instantiate (or are) our mental states. Functional roles are basically what the states do. What a clock does is keep time. A clock can be implemented by a digital device, a bunch of gears, or even sand or water set up in the right system (but would they be the same clock?). Functionalists think our desires, beliefs, sensations, emotions, pains, memories, etc. can be understood in terms of what they do--that is, the way they take input information, organize it, and interact with each other, to cause output mental states and behavior. Computers helped motivate this theory of mind, and if certain versions of it are right, then our mental states could be implemented in complex enough computer systems, presumably connected...

This is a very important and difficult question: how do we get from no consciousness to (our) consciousness? You've put the question in terms of ontogeny (or development), but the same sort of question arises in terms of phylogeny (or evolution)--which animals are conscious and which are not, and how did the latter evolve from the former? The panpsychist alternative (b) may help, and it is advanced by contemporary philosophers such as Galen Strawson (and more tentatively, by David Chalmers). Despite that answer having to assert the seemingly weird claim that rocks have some sort of proto-conscious capacities, it is also unclear if panpsychism helps to answer the problem you raise, since we still need to know what organization of the proto-conscious material parts allows for the more complex consciousness we recognize in some animals and in humans. How do we get from paramecium (or blastocysts) made up of parts that have both physical and conscious properties to monkeys (or babies) that are...

Suppose there are two mutations that would allow a species of plant to gather more sunlight for energy, one that would make it grow taller than competing plants and another than would make it grow wider. The species happens to evolve to grow taller. It is true that it might have achieved the adaptive function of gathering more energy without growing taller (i.e., by growing wider instead). So, growing taller was not necessary (i.e., the only way) to achieve this function. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to say that the plant's height is causally irrelevant to its capacities to gather energy from sunlight. Similarly, it might be that a species (call them p-zombies) might have evolved that could gather and synthesize information about various features of its environment just as well as us but without being phenomenally conscious. But the possibility of such a species tells us nothing about whether phenomenal consciousness in us (and other animals) plays a causal role in gathering and...

It doesn't. There are several possibilities here. One is that there is a causal relationship between the physical brain and a non-physical mind, which can still make sense of the idea that when alcohol is coursing through your veins into your brain it causes your conscious experiences to be funky or when a part of your brain is lesioned it causes mental disorders. This view is Descartes' dualism. If it is true, then presumably your non-physical mind (or soul) can survive after your physical body dies (though it's hard to imagine how things would be for your bodiless soul in "heaven"--e.g., how do you find grandma? and what would you do for fun?). This view becomes less plausible the stronger the correlations between brain states and mental states become (the soul seems to have nothing left to do). So, supposing such dualism is implausible and we assume this evidence of a causal relationship between brains and consciousness is evidence of a physicalist view, one that says the mind just ...