People have thought about it but I also don’t know of anything extensive being written. Counting discretely if a consciousnesses “exists once” or “exists twice” don’t seem like the right take to me. What happens if you cut the circuits in your CPU into 10 pieces that each do the same computation independently—do you get 10 times as many conscious beings? (A possible solution to this puzzle is that the “anthropic measure” of a computation has a multiplicative factor by the number of bits the computation erases, which would mean that reversible computers aren’t conscious)
[EDIT] I’ll mention that reversible computations, even if not part of a quantum computer, are quantumly weird. We’re not sure about much about anthropics, but one thing we are confident in is the Born rule. Whatever your interpretation of quantum mechanics is, it probably involves decoherence. And reversible computations don’t decohere.
Comment from 12 years ago, −3 karma… that’s a deep cut. It is related to the thick-wire problem, yeah, good point.
I’m not super convinced (but intrigued) by your proposal that a computation is not conscious unless it erases bits.
Additional thought: If we accept UDASSA or some other computational view of anthropics+cosmology then we are (mostly, in terms of measure) computations embedded in a bigger, reversible, computation. Maybe it’s about how many output bits of the universe-computation I affect, and if I’m reversible I don’t affect any?
The quantum connection feels weird, and I don’t feel like I understand this stuff well enough to comment, but at least Claude Sonnet 4.5 tells me philosophers haven’t yet argued about the moral weight of minds in superposition, which is really surprising to me.
People have thought about it but I also don’t know of anything extensive being written. Counting discretely if a consciousnesses “exists once” or “exists twice” don’t seem like the right take to me. What happens if you cut the circuits in your CPU into 10 pieces that each do the same computation independently—do you get 10 times as many conscious beings? (A possible solution to this puzzle is that the “anthropic measure” of a computation has a multiplicative factor by the number of bits the computation erases, which would mean that reversible computers aren’t conscious)
[EDIT] I’ll mention that reversible computations, even if not part of a quantum computer, are quantumly weird. We’re not sure about much about anthropics, but one thing we are confident in is the Born rule. Whatever your interpretation of quantum mechanics is, it probably involves decoherence. And reversible computations don’t decohere.
Comment from 12 years ago, −3 karma… that’s a deep cut. It is related to the thick-wire problem, yeah, good point.
I’m not super convinced (but intrigued) by your proposal that a computation is not conscious unless it erases bits.
Additional thought: If we accept UDASSA or some other computational view of anthropics+cosmology then we are (mostly, in terms of measure) computations embedded in a bigger, reversible, computation. Maybe it’s about how many output bits of the universe-computation I affect, and if I’m reversible I don’t affect any?
The quantum connection feels weird, and I don’t feel like I understand this stuff well enough to comment, but at least Claude Sonnet 4.5 tells me philosophers haven’t yet argued about the moral weight of minds in superposition, which is really surprising to me.
I think you meant to say “is not conscious”.