williyamyam

This feels similar to a gauge transformation in physics, where there seems to be an extra degree of freedom that cannot be eliminated.  But even within the same mind there is still a problem with qualia: Take the visual field for example.  Imagine reflecting your visual field as in a mirror. Would anything change in the external world? I would argue this would also be a perfectly viable mapping of the external world to phenomenal states, and yet, it would seem to imply that the reflected visual field is isomorphic to the original field.  It would seem that this experiment can be done in reality, and although I haven't tried it myself,... (read more)

This is missing a key feature of substrate dependence, namely the role of time in the universe.  What is implicit in the substrate, is that it exists in the universe. By existing in the universe, it must "flow" through time. And it is this connection to time that is key to its role in consciousness. 

Take the standard thought experiment of a simulated digital mind. Is this mind conscious? Well here is the thing about "digital existence": it lies outside of time. You can run the simulation at 1x speed or 1000x speed, but it makes no difference to the simulated mind, as long as it is isolated from the external world. Even... (read more)

This brings up an interesting consideration: Imagine two observers existing in the same universe, one being the time reverse of the other. From their internal perspectives, each views its own observations as defining an arrow of time, yet their arrows point in opposite directions. It would seem then, that the arrow of time resides in conscious experience itself, and is not a property of the universe. And yet it would seem to define a "canonical" direction to time, even if the external time parameter were reversed.

So would it even make sense to have an observer that can experience time from the opposite direction? Why can't I experience my death and then age... (read 574 more words →)

I didn't want to derail this conversation into another free will debate, it wasn't my main focus, so I will try to be "brief" on responding to your view on free will:  

It seems that you subscribe to the "standard model" against free will, that is, either things are determined by external causes, and you have no free will, or they are random, in which that would also constitute the nullification of free will. I am not sure your 3 arguments are actually distinct; they basically point to the same source, namely that "randomness" is not free will, and neither is determinism.

However, this seems like a too simplistic picture, which assumes that... (read 499 more words →)

Yes, once you think about consciousness for some time, you could conclude that there might be some sort of Platonic existence for subjective experience. However, this seems to nullify free will and makes things kind of pointless in the sense that if all moments have already happened, it doesn't really matter what you do, you are just navigating a space that already exists and will always exist. Intuitively, this doesn't sound right, and perhaps there is something missing in this picture.

This brings up the vertiginous question. That is, why is THIS moment currently in view, and not another? The trivial answer is that all perspectives somehow "exist" in some Platonic realm. But... (read more)

I reject the first step. 

Most posts on this site just seem to posit that there is some "stuff" called information which just exists "somewhere" that is independent of any reference frames. That you can reference a "state" whatever that means.

Consider the set of all possible states in which an observer is reading a page out of a book from the library of babel. Now take one of these states that corresponds to a mind within the library of babel. From its subjective point of view, it has information about its environment corresponding to the page that it is reading, yet the total information contained in the system is actually less than that... (read more)

I think this is related to the idea that intelligence is compression. But when we think of compression we immediately run into a conundrum: If something is compressible, it means the language used to express the piece of information is not optimal. An optimal description of a thing must be expressed in the most economical way possible. This can only be done if the right frame is used to express the thing in mind. In the right frame you can just "see" the answer, because any translation between your frame and the optimal frame represents a suboptimal routine that can be compressed away. Therefore there is no upper limit on intelligence in... (read more)