We also need (I would think) for the experience of consciousness to somehow cause your brain to instruct your hands to type “cogito ergo sum”. From what you wrote, I’m sorta imagining physical laws plus experience glued to it … and that physical laws without experience glued to it would still lead to the same nerve firing pattern, right? Or maybe you’ll say physical laws without experience is logically impossible? Or what?
I don’t find the question relevant. That’s a physicist’s application of Occam’s razor: extra postulates about consciousness don’t affect physical calculations, so we should ignore them—just like MWI vs CI doesn’t affect experimental predictions, so a physicist shouldn’t care what interpretation is used.
But my concern is the intersection of physics and philosophy: what moral weight should I give in my utilitarian assessment of possible futures outcomes? Whether a life form is conscious or not doesn’t matter much from a physicists perspective because it doesn’t affect the biochemical calculations, but it does matter to the question “should I protect this life?”
There is a division in the transhumanist community between whether one should identify with the instance of a computation, or the description of a computation. This has practical, real-world consequences: should I sign up for cryonics (with the possibility of revival, but you suffer some damage) or brain preservation (less damage, but only destructive uploading options)?
If the panpsychic consciousness-in-every-interaction postulate I stated is true, then morality and personal utility comes down instance of computation, not description of computation camp. This means cryonics (long sleep) is favored over brain preservation (kill-and-copy), and weird stuff like quantum suicide are also ruled out as options.
Interesting!
We also need (I would think) for the experience of consciousness to somehow cause your brain to instruct your hands to type “cogito ergo sum”. From what you wrote, I’m sorta imagining physical laws plus experience glued to it … and that physical laws without experience glued to it would still lead to the same nerve firing pattern, right? Or maybe you’ll say physical laws without experience is logically impossible? Or what?
I don’t find the question relevant. That’s a physicist’s application of Occam’s razor: extra postulates about consciousness don’t affect physical calculations, so we should ignore them—just like MWI vs CI doesn’t affect experimental predictions, so a physicist shouldn’t care what interpretation is used.
But my concern is the intersection of physics and philosophy: what moral weight should I give in my utilitarian assessment of possible futures outcomes? Whether a life form is conscious or not doesn’t matter much from a physicists perspective because it doesn’t affect the biochemical calculations, but it does matter to the question “should I protect this life?”
There is a division in the transhumanist community between whether one should identify with the instance of a computation, or the description of a computation. This has practical, real-world consequences: should I sign up for cryonics (with the possibility of revival, but you suffer some damage) or brain preservation (less damage, but only destructive uploading options)?
If the panpsychic consciousness-in-every-interaction postulate I stated is true, then morality and personal utility comes down instance of computation, not description of computation camp. This means cryonics (long sleep) is favored over brain preservation (kill-and-copy), and weird stuff like quantum suicide are also ruled out as options.