Yash, the reason we can’t start at the level of sensations is that, from sensations, we could not grasp entities, identity, or causality. There would be no way to go from “splotch of blue,” “cool pressure,” “blaring noise,” and so on to “a police car just zoomed past.” Sensations simply do not register. In regard to computers, sensations would be totally useless to a computer, because sensations are not integrated or retained. What engineers have to figure out, and are already doing from what I understand, is to register, let’s say, pixels and patterns of pixels, as certain things, thereby enabling the assignment of identity. This is the rough computer equivalent of perception, not of sensation.
