Nick: IL, to do what you suggest you’d have to actually compute the history of your universe, meaning the causal relations would exist, so there wouldn’t be any problem with there being consciousness.
I don’t think that’s correct. You could populate your model with random data, and if that data happens to be an accurate representation of the timeless universe, then poof you have created consciousness with no computation required (unless you believe that acquiring random data and writing it to RAM is “computation” of the kind that should create causality and consciousness).
Granted, most such randomly populated models wouldn’t contain causality or consciousness. But a non-zero number of them would.
I think IL’s point stands. If the universe is timeless, then a sufficiently large integer is full of conscious beings.
Nick: IL, to do what you suggest you’d have to actually compute the history of your universe, meaning the causal relations would exist, so there wouldn’t be any problem with there being consciousness.
I don’t think that’s correct. You could populate your model with random data, and if that data happens to be an accurate representation of the timeless universe, then poof you have created consciousness with no computation required (unless you believe that acquiring random data and writing it to RAM is “computation” of the kind that should create causality and consciousness).
Granted, most such randomly populated models wouldn’t contain causality or consciousness. But a non-zero number of them would.
I think IL’s point stands. If the universe is timeless, then a sufficiently large integer is full of conscious beings.