But it is not clear at all that such a being could even exist in principle. A digital mind that lacks a body it is trying to keep alive, that has entirely different senses than our interoceptive and exteroceptive ones, and that has an entirely different repertoire of actions available to it will have an entirely alien generative model of its world, and thus an entirely alien phenomenology — if it even has one. We can guess what it’s like to be a bat: its reliance on sonar to navigate the world likely creates a phenomenology of “auditory colors” that track how surfaces reflect sound waves similar to our perception of visual color. It’s much harder to guess what it’s like, if anything, to be an “em”.
Sure they could. In principle, if a brain could be emulated virtually, why not a virtual body and virtual environment? That was always my understanding of what an “em” would be, not this disembodied straw-em.
Similarly, the consciousness explanation that Jacob Falkovich gives would give a lot of things consciousness, though not everything. In particular, the improved Good Regulator Theorem, which proposes that at least one part of consciousness is essentially having models of the world, is applicable to any capable system. Similarly, I expect the cybernetic model to have widespread use, in the sense that a lot of things will find it useful to regulate something.
I think the strongest takeaway from Anil Seth’s model is that future consciousness could be very, very alien, especially once we take away certain parts of it.
Sure they could. In principle, if a brain could be emulated virtually, why not a virtual body and virtual environment? That was always my understanding of what an “em” would be, not this disembodied straw-em.
Similarly, the consciousness explanation that Jacob Falkovich gives would give a lot of things consciousness, though not everything. In particular, the improved Good Regulator Theorem, which proposes that at least one part of consciousness is essentially having models of the world, is applicable to any capable system. Similarly, I expect the cybernetic model to have widespread use, in the sense that a lot of things will find it useful to regulate something.
I think the strongest takeaway from Anil Seth’s model is that future consciousness could be very, very alien, especially once we take away certain parts of it.