If a homomorphically encrypted system is conscious, then it must be the encrypted computation that is conscious, not the decryption, since decrypting text probably doesn’t produce consciousness.
I disagree with this actually. You can always come up with a “decryption” scheme which would produce a specific computation as a result of some arbitrary string of text. And it seems clear that there’s a sort of spectrum between non-encryption and this sort of arbitrary decryption, such that you can pass arbitrary amounts of the “real” computation between the actual process and the decryption process (e.g. by encoding some low resolution version of the computation, and then “decrypting” it in a way which fills in the remainder).
Or from an anthropic point of view, I can take a nice, easily described universe, and then point to my location within it, and this is a certain number of bits. And my guess is that my anthropic measure has to do with this length, as integrated over all structures where this process results in a canonical description of my consciousness. The lawfulness of the universe makes locating me far more easy than as a Boltzmann brain, and for the same reason, than as a highly encrypted brain.
I assume it’s possible to have homomorphic encryption where the key is verifiable. Like if you randomly guessed it, you would be able to decrypt, and if you guessed wrong, you would know you failed to decrypt. The “key checking process” could even be memory-light. In which case it looks like in a “encrypt → compute → decrypt” process, the “decrypt” can’t be doing consciousness, because it’s a massively parallelizable, memory-light guess-and-check.
I disagree with this actually. You can always come up with a “decryption” scheme which would produce a specific computation as a result of some arbitrary string of text. And it seems clear that there’s a sort of spectrum between non-encryption and this sort of arbitrary decryption, such that you can pass arbitrary amounts of the “real” computation between the actual process and the decryption process (e.g. by encoding some low resolution version of the computation, and then “decrypting” it in a way which fills in the remainder).
Or from an anthropic point of view, I can take a nice, easily described universe, and then point to my location within it, and this is a certain number of bits. And my guess is that my anthropic measure has to do with this length, as integrated over all structures where this process results in a canonical description of my consciousness. The lawfulness of the universe makes locating me far more easy than as a Boltzmann brain, and for the same reason, than as a highly encrypted brain.
I assume it’s possible to have homomorphic encryption where the key is verifiable. Like if you randomly guessed it, you would be able to decrypt, and if you guessed wrong, you would know you failed to decrypt. The “key checking process” could even be memory-light. In which case it looks like in a “encrypt → compute → decrypt” process, the “decrypt” can’t be doing consciousness, because it’s a massively parallelizable, memory-light guess-and-check.
Ok, that’s fair actually. Maybe you do think the encryption and decryption involved in homomorphic encryption produces consciousness