His example is different in a very particular way:
His conscious entity gets to dump photons into de Sitter space directly and only if you open it. This makes Scott’s counter-claim prima facie basically plausible—if your putative consciousness only involves reversible actions, then is it really conscious?
But, I specifically drew a line between Alice and Alice’s Room, and specified that Alice’s normal operations are irreversible—but they must also dump entropy into the Room, taking in one of its 0 bits and returning something that might be 1 or 0, and if you feed her a 1 bit, she dies on waste heat (maybe she has some degree of tolerance for 1s, but as the density of 1s approaches 50% she cannot survive).
If you were to just leave the Room open all the time, always resetting its qbits to 0, Alice would operate the same, aside from having no risk of heatstroke. (In this case, of course, if you run the simulation backwards, the result would not be where you started, but catastrophe).
I think this is a pretty crucial distinction.
...
At least that find explains why the comment disappeared without a ripple. It triggered “I’ve seen this before”.
His example is different in a very particular way:
His conscious entity gets to dump photons into de Sitter space directly and only if you open it. This makes Scott’s counter-claim prima facie basically plausible—if your putative consciousness only involves reversible actions, then is it really conscious?
But, I specifically drew a line between Alice and Alice’s Room, and specified that Alice’s normal operations are irreversible—but they must also dump entropy into the Room, taking in one of its 0 bits and returning something that might be 1 or 0, and if you feed her a 1 bit, she dies on waste heat (maybe she has some degree of tolerance for 1s, but as the density of 1s approaches 50% she cannot survive).
If you were to just leave the Room open all the time, always resetting its qbits to 0, Alice would operate the same, aside from having no risk of heatstroke. (In this case, of course, if you run the simulation backwards, the result would not be where you started, but catastrophe).
I think this is a pretty crucial distinction.
...
At least that find explains why the comment disappeared without a ripple. It triggered “I’ve seen this before”.