I think you are conscious, and so is the combination of iron bar and crazy complex mapping. In the latter case, the crazy complex mapping does all the work and in some sense _is_ conscious.
In theory, we could pass any Turing test of finite duration (eg an hour or less) and run in a chat room with finite bandwidth with a giant lookup table. Just look up the entire past of the conversation to see what answer should be given. The lookup can be implemented trivially on any Turing machine (and doesn't even need the machine's full power).
Now there's multiple directions you could take this. Here's Scott with one of them:
> Briefly, Searle proposed a thought experiment—the details don’t concern us here—purporting to show that a computer program could pass the Turing Test, even though the program manifestly lacked anything that a reasonable person would call “intelligence” or “understanding.” (Indeed, Searle argues that no physical system can understand anything “purely by virtue of” the computations that it implements.) In response, many critics said that Searle’s argument was deeply misleading, because it implicitly encouraged us to imagine a computer program that was simplistic in its internal operations—something like the giant lookup table described in Section 4.1. And while it was true, the critics went on, that a giant lookup table wouldn’t “truly understand” its responses, that point is also irrelevant. For the giant lookup table is a philosophical fiction anyway: something that can’t even fit in the observable universe! If we instead imagine a compact, efficient computer program passing the Turing Test, then the situation changes drastically. For now, in order to explain how the program can be so compact and efficient, we’ll need to posit that the program includes representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning, and all sorts of other internal furniture that we would expect to find in a mind.
> Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. According to this response, an exponential-sized lookup table that passed the Turing Test would not be sentient (or conscious, intelligent, self-aware, etc.), but a polynomially-bounded program with exactly the same input/output behavior would be sentient. Furthermore, the latter program would be sentient because it was polynomially-bounded.
See 'The Lookup-Table Argument' in https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf for the rest. It's all very fascinating.
So any application of big-O notation to this would require some generalisation and abuse of notation. It's a bit hard to formally argue which abuse is The Right One.
Still, the Turing test was never meant as a measure of "consciousness", right?
GPT-3 can generate natural looking text and even dialogues, if you don't press it too hard. But a motivated adversary can tell GPT-3 from a real human pretty quickly still.
The Turing test still stands undefeated.
The second you assert that the lookup table can pass a turing test with, eg. a gigabyte of exchange, then the table of every single one gigabyte number in it becomes your state space and program, the page number becomes the state, and you've got just as much complexity as any other simulation with one gigabyte of state. You haven't changed the parameters of the problem at all.
Yes, from an complexity theory or engineering point of view the lookup table is pointless, of course.
Your brain can hold 1 brain state. But it gets the same results as a universe-dwarfing lookup table.