On 5/9/2019 5:18 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
That all subjectively indistinguishable computations going through that state are a possibility means the consciousness cannot identify itself with any one particular thread of computation. In this sense that consciousness is not the same as one of the programs passing through that state. But to say the consciousness is not identical with one of the computations is different from saying that computation is not conscious. If none of the threads of computation resulted in consciousness, you wouldn't magically get consciousness once you reached an infinite number of them. The only thing you gain with the infinite number of all the computations going through that state is the correct statistics regarding the future evolution of that conscious.
"The state" seems a problematic concept to me. It tries to roughly equate a state of consciousness, a thought, with a state of a Turing machine (plus tape). But saying yes to the doctor implies a much lower level of substitution than "a thought". Thoughts come from perceptions, among other things, which are not complete thoughts or "states of consciousness". So it is not at all clear what it means for "computations going thru that state" when the state may refer to thousands of steps of the Turing machine. Is a computation thread that share 999 of the states "going thru the state"? And to further complicate this mapping between thoughts and machine states, there sequence of machine states is the same at the temporal order of thoughts.
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