Consciousness is software might be obvious to some, particularly the readers of David Deustch. Its implications are profound in today’s AI hyped world.
Software is generally speaking accomplished by a series of abstractions. The real hardware in silicon world is a mixture of quantum mechanics (electrons storing bits, logic gates doing computation). The semiconductor chip itself has some software to make it do the computation using what is called as the instruction set architecture. Then come different programming languages and how the translation happens between human readable code and computer instructions. The abstractions don’t end there. To make something really useful you will need an operating system. Finally at the top sit applications which contain all the “useful” bits (I’m ignoring the differences between services and applications as it doesn’t matter in the context of this write up).
I am speculating that our minds may have some hierarchy of abstractions. Brain with electrical and chemical signal processing provides hardware. Various emotions and states are programs that have been discovered by evolution. Learning a skill in this analogy is programming yourself. Culture, relationships and identity are similarly the software part. Perhaps consciousness is being aware of the various programs available to you.