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 of the single observer, which can be specified as the set of all possible observers reading a page from the library of babel.
So where is the information coming from? It is the self location of the observer that contains the information. All the information is contained in the reference frame, and this is the primary concern of all condundrums about consciousness. Fundamentally consciousness is about reference frames and the semantics of language.
I could continue making objections at every step, but to keep things brief I will make only an objection which may bear some useful fruit, which occurs at step 5, that is the possibility of digital consciousness. I object to this step in the sense that a digital consciousness means an ability to copy or clone a system “perfectly” with digital accuracy. Again, the problem here is the relationship between reference frames and the ability to copy information. I posit that copying information is forbidden in the sense that you cannot copy reference frames. You run into the usual paradoxes around teleportation and sleeping beauty problems.
In physical reality the only way for an object to be copied is to be destroyed and instantiated somewhere else, and I posit this is how objects actually move through space. Motion is possible because it is impossible to make a digital copy of that object. If you allow for a digital copy of reference frames, suddenly you could perceive all sorts of physical law violations from a subjective point of view, and you may argue this is possible because this happens all the time in dreams. But we enter a slippery slope here, as now we must question our very foundations of physical reality and how to make sense of it.
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 of the single observer, which can be specified as the set of all possible observers reading a page from the library of babel.
So where is the information coming from? It is the self location of the observer that contains the information. All the information is contained in the reference frame, and this is the primary concern of all condundrums about consciousness. Fundamentally consciousness is about reference frames and the semantics of language.
I could continue making objections at every step, but to keep things brief I will make only an objection which may bear some useful fruit, which occurs at step 5, that is the possibility of digital consciousness. I object to this step in the sense that a digital consciousness means an ability to copy or clone a system “perfectly” with digital accuracy. Again, the problem here is the relationship between reference frames and the ability to copy information. I posit that copying information is forbidden in the sense that you cannot copy reference frames. You run into the usual paradoxes around teleportation and sleeping beauty problems.
In physical reality the only way for an object to be copied is to be destroyed and instantiated somewhere else, and I posit this is how objects actually move through space. Motion is possible because it is impossible to make a digital copy of that object. If you allow for a digital copy of reference frames, suddenly you could perceive all sorts of physical law violations from a subjective point of view, and you may argue this is possible because this happens all the time in dreams. But we enter a slippery slope here, as now we must question our very foundations of physical reality and how to make sense of it.