Why stop at the written program level? What if you are about to type the final semi-colon in the description of a simulated human? When does it become an L-zombie or, alternatively, conscious? What about the day before you go to your office to finish the program? Maybe at the moment you made the decision to write this program? Where is the magical boundary? Is “finished program” just a convenient Schelling point?
I’m not sure which of the following two questions you meant to ask (though I guess probably the second one), so I’ll answer both:
(a) “Under what circumstances is something (either an l-zombie or conscious)?” I am not saying that something is an l-zombie only if someone has actually written out the code of the program; for the purposes of this post, I assume that all natural numbers exist as platonical objects, and therefore all observers in programs that someone could in principle write and run exist at least as l-zombies.
(b) “When is a program an l-zombie, and when is it conscious?” The naive view would be that the program has to be actually run in the physical world; if you’ve written a program and then deleted the source without running it, it wouldn’t be conscious. But as to what exactly the rule is that you can use to look at say a cellular automaton (as a model of physical reality) and ask whether the conscious experience inside a given Turing machine is “instantiated inside” that automaton, I don’t have one to propose. I do think that’s a weak point of the l-zombies view, and one reason that I’d assign measureless Tegmark IV higher a priori probability.
Why stop at the written program level? What if you are about to type the final semi-colon in the description of a simulated human? When does it become an L-zombie or, alternatively, conscious? What about the day before you go to your office to finish the program? Maybe at the moment you made the decision to write this program? Where is the magical boundary? Is “finished program” just a convenient Schelling point?
I’m not sure which of the following two questions you meant to ask (though I guess probably the second one), so I’ll answer both:
(a) “Under what circumstances is something (either an l-zombie or conscious)?” I am not saying that something is an l-zombie only if someone has actually written out the code of the program; for the purposes of this post, I assume that all natural numbers exist as platonical objects, and therefore all observers in programs that someone could in principle write and run exist at least as l-zombies.
(b) “When is a program an l-zombie, and when is it conscious?” The naive view would be that the program has to be actually run in the physical world; if you’ve written a program and then deleted the source without running it, it wouldn’t be conscious. But as to what exactly the rule is that you can use to look at say a cellular automaton (as a model of physical reality) and ask whether the conscious experience inside a given Turing machine is “instantiated inside” that automaton, I don’t have one to propose. I do think that’s a weak point of the l-zombies view, and one reason that I’d assign measureless Tegmark IV higher a priori probability.
Thanks for clarifying!