Um, functional computationalism is scifi, not physics in re consciousness. It assigns the same level of reality to written numeric patterns of a dog as to a real dog. And your self for that matter. How can you prove numbers exist physically?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...

“Fringe theory” is just a knee jerk authoritarianism for method in re knowledge claims.

Classical functionalism is only mainstream if one prioritizes abstract modeling over empirical brain science.