From this extreme, even most scientific rationalists recoil. They say, no, even if we don’t yet know exactly what’s meant by “physical instantiation”, we agree that you only get consciousness if the computer program is physically instantiated somehow.
Why, no, I disagree. To explain why I’m not a Boltzmann brain or a sequence of pi digits or asomething like that, it seems enough to just use a prior based on description length. There’s no need to postulate the existence of physics as something separate from math.
Added some elaboration to the parent comment. I just feel that using a simplicity-based prior might solve many problems that seem otherwise mysterious. 1) I’m not a Boltzmann brain because locating a Boltzmann brain takes much more bits than deriving my brain from the laws of physics. 2) A mind running under homomorphic encryption is conscious, and its measure depends inverse exponentially on the size of the decryption key. 3) Multiple or larger computers running the same program contain more consciousness than one small computer, because they take fewer bits to locate. 4) The early universe had low entropy because it had a short description. And so on.
There’s this part near the end:
Why, no, I disagree. To explain why I’m not a Boltzmann brain or a sequence of pi digits or asomething like that, it seems enough to just use a prior based on description length. There’s no need to postulate the existence of physics as something separate from math.
Don’t project your priors onto the universe. You might find yourself surprised.
Feel free to elaborate, here or there.
Added some elaboration to the parent comment. I just feel that using a simplicity-based prior might solve many problems that seem otherwise mysterious. 1) I’m not a Boltzmann brain because locating a Boltzmann brain takes much more bits than deriving my brain from the laws of physics. 2) A mind running under homomorphic encryption is conscious, and its measure depends inverse exponentially on the size of the decryption key. 3) Multiple or larger computers running the same program contain more consciousness than one small computer, because they take fewer bits to locate. 4) The early universe had low entropy because it had a short description. And so on.