In reviewing Warren’s paper on consciousness, I noted this passage as relevant here:
Passive observation involves taking in the input without sending a signal downwards for control. This is the mode we tend to experience when simply observing a scene, or viewing an object; it is coincidentally the mode often engendered by experimental studies in which a “stimulus” is presented to a participant who is given a behavioral instruction, rather than being allowed to control their input as they would do naturally outside the experiment (Mansell & Huddy, 2018; Marken, 2021). If an individual does not act on their external environment to keep ongoing perceptual input at its reference value, then perceptual error builds up and another process is required to reduce the error. One of these error-reduction solutions is the imagination mode which involves rerouting memory as input “as if” it is being currently experienced, so that higher level systems can receive inputs at their reference value, without engagement with the environment. Clearly, this mode refers to the basis of what is now described as mental simulation (Markman et al., 2012). However, if imagination is insufficient to reduce error then, naturally, reorganization is required to reduce any prolonged error.
This recommends a different kind of instruction for your demo. Instead of giving the participant behavioral instruction, present it as a problem for observation and deduction. Tell them first just pay attention to sizes and figure out what’s going on. Then tell them to figure out the relationships between successive figures, accounting for color and size together. It will take serious persistence, but having done that they will have gone far in building a perceptual input function that can replicate what your computer program is doing. Their description how how they perceive that structure (which they have organized in their brain) will be much more valuable than giving them the computer logic and telling them essentially to replicate it so they can recognize when the specified program is running and when it is not (because the unspecified program is running). The other program could be based on a random number generator, it’s still a computer program, but they would not be able to generate an input function to recognize randomness. They would say they couldn’t find any regularity in that subset.