That seems to rely on answering the “hard problem of consciousness” (or as I prefer, “problem of first-person something-rather-than-nothing”) with an answer like, “the integrated awareness is what gets instantiated by metaphysics”.
That seems weird as heck to me. It makes more sense for first-person-something-rather-than-nothing question to be answered by “the individual perspectives of causal nodes (interacting particles’ wavefunctions, or whatever else interacts in spatially local ways) in the universe’s equations are what gets Instantiated™ As Real® by metaphysics”.
(by metaphysics here I just mean ~that-which-can-exist, or ~the-root-node-of-all-possibility; eg this is the thing solomonoff induction tries to model by assuming the root-node-of-all-possibility contains only halting programs, or tegmark 4 tries to model as some mumble mumble blurrier version of solomonoff or something (I don’t quite grok tegmark 4); I mean the root node of the entire multiverse of all things which existed at “the beginning”, the most origin-y origin. the thing where, when we’re surprised there’s something rather than nothing, we’re surprised that this thing isn’t just an empty set.)
If we assume my belief about how to resolve this philosophical confusion is correct, then we cannot construct a description of a hypothetical universe that could have been among those truly instantiated as physically real in the multiverse, and yet also have this property where the hard-problem “first-person-something-rather-than-nothing” can disappear over some timesteps but not others. Instead, everything humans appear to have preferences about relating to death becomes about the so called easy problem, the question of why the many first-person-something-rather-than-nothings of the particles of our brain are able to sustain an integrated awareness. Perhaps that integrated awareness comes and goes, eg with sleep! It seems to me to be what all interesting research on consciousness is about. But I think that either, a new first-person-something-rather-than-nothing-sense-of-Consciousness is allocated to all the particles of the whole universe in every infinitesimal time slice that the universe in question’s true laws permit; or, that first-person-something-rather-than-nothing is conserved over time. So I don’t worry too much about losing the hard-problem consciousness, as I generally believe it’s just “being made of physical stuff which Actually Exists in a privileged sense”.
The thing is, this answer to the hard problem of consciousness has kind of weird results relating to eating food. Because it means eating food is a form of uploading! you transfer your chemical processes to a new chunk of matter, and a previous chunk of matter is aggregated as waste product. That waste product was previously part of you, and if every particle has a discrete first-person-something-rather-than-nothing which is conserved, then when you eat food you are “waking up” previously sleeping matter, and the waste matter goes to sleep, forgetting near everything about you into thermal noise!
“Easy” problem
So there’s still an interesting problem to resolve—and in fact what I’ve said resolves almost nothing; it only answers camp #2, providing what I hope is an argument for why they should become primarily interested in camp #1. In camp #1 terms, we can discuss information theory or causal properties about whether the information or causal chain that makes up the things those first-person-perspective-units ie particles are information theoretically “aware of” or “know” things about their environment; we can ask causal questions—eg, “is my red your red?” can instead be “assume my red is your red if there is no experiment which can distinguish them, so can we find such an experiment?”—in which case, I don’t worry about losing even the camp #1 form of selfhood-consciousness from sleep, because my brain is overwhelmingly unchanged from sleep and stopping activations and whole-brain synchronization of state doesn’t mean it can’t be restarted.
It’s still possible that every point in spacetime has a separate first-person-something-rather-than-nothing-”consciousness”/”existence”, in which case maybe actually even causally identical shapes of particles/physical stuff in my brain which are my neurons representing “a perception of red in the center of my visual field in the past 100ms” are a different qualia than the same ones at a different infinitesimal timestep, or are different qualia than if the exact same shape of particles occurred in your brain. But it seems even less possible to get traction on that metaphysical question than on the question of the origin of first-person-something-rather-than-nothing, and since I don’t know of there being any great answers to something-rather-than-nothing, I figure we probably won’t ever be able to know. (Also, our neurons for red are, in fact, slightly different. I expect the practical difference is small.)
But that either doesn’t resolve or at least partially backs OP’s point, about timesteps/timeslices already potentially being different selves in some strong sense, due to ~lack of causal access across time, or so. Since the thing I’m proposing also says non-interacting particles in equilibrium have an inactive-yet-still-real first-person-something-rather-than-nothing, then even rocks or whatever you’re on top of right now or your keyboard keys carry the bare-fact-of-existence, and so my preference for not dying can’t be about the particles making me up continuing to exist—they cannot be destroyed, thanks to conservation laws of the universe, only rearranged—and my preference is instead about the integrated awareness of all of these particles, where they are shaped and moving in patterns which are working together in a synchronized, evolution-refined, self-regenerating dance we call “being alive”. And so it’s perfectly true that the matter that makes me up can implement any preference about what successor shapes are valid.
Unwantable preferences?
On the other hand, to disagree with OP a bit, I think there’s more objective truth to the matter about what humans prefer than that. Evolution should create very robust preferences for some kinds of thing, such as having some sort of successor state which is still able to maintain autopoesis. I think it’s actually so highly evolutionarily unfit to not want that that it’s almost unwantable for an evolved being to not want there to be some informationally related autopoietic patterns continuing in the future.
Eg, consider suicide—even suicidal people would be horrified by the idea that all humans would die if they died, and I suspect that suicide is an (incredibly high cost, please avoid it if at all possible!) adaptation that has been preserved because there are very rare cases where it can be increase the inclusive fitness of a group the organism arose from (but I generally believe it almost never is a best strategy, so if anyone reads this who is thinking about it, please be aware I think it’s a terribly high cost way to solve whatever problem makes it come to mind, and there are almost certainly tractable better options—poke me if a nerd like me can ever give useful input); but I bring it up because it means, while you can maybe consider the rest of humanity or life on earth to be not sufficiently “you” in an information theory sense that dying suddenly becomes fine, it seems to me to be at least one important reason that suicide is ever acceptable to anyone at all; if they knew they were the last organism I feel like even a maximally suicidal person would want to stick it out for as long as possible, because if all other life forms are dead they’d want to preserve the last gasp of the legacy of life? idk.
But yeah, the only constraints on what you want are what physics permits matter to encode and what you already want. You probably can’t just decide to want any old thing, because you already want something different than that. Other than that objection, I think I basically agree with OP.
[edit: pinned to profile]
“Hard” problem
That seems to rely on answering the “hard problem of consciousness” (or as I prefer, “problem of first-person something-rather-than-nothing”) with an answer like, “the integrated awareness is what gets instantiated by metaphysics”.
That seems weird as heck to me. It makes more sense for first-person-something-rather-than-nothing question to be answered by “the individual perspectives of causal nodes (interacting particles’ wavefunctions, or whatever else interacts in spatially local ways) in the universe’s equations are what gets Instantiated™ As Real® by metaphysics”.
(by metaphysics here I just mean ~that-which-can-exist, or ~the-root-node-of-all-possibility; eg this is the thing solomonoff induction tries to model by assuming the root-node-of-all-possibility contains only halting programs, or tegmark 4 tries to model as some mumble mumble blurrier version of solomonoff or something (I don’t quite grok tegmark 4); I mean the root node of the entire multiverse of all things which existed at “the beginning”, the most origin-y origin. the thing where, when we’re surprised there’s something rather than nothing, we’re surprised that this thing isn’t just an empty set.)
If we assume my belief about how to resolve this philosophical confusion is correct, then we cannot construct a description of a hypothetical universe that could have been among those truly instantiated as physically real in the multiverse, and yet also have this property where the hard-problem “first-person-something-rather-than-nothing” can disappear over some timesteps but not others. Instead, everything humans appear to have preferences about relating to death becomes about the so called easy problem, the question of why the many first-person-something-rather-than-nothings of the particles of our brain are able to sustain an integrated awareness. Perhaps that integrated awareness comes and goes, eg with sleep! It seems to me to be what all interesting research on consciousness is about. But I think that either, a new first-person-something-rather-than-nothing-sense-of-Consciousness is allocated to all the particles of the whole universe in every infinitesimal time slice that the universe in question’s true laws permit; or, that first-person-something-rather-than-nothing is conserved over time. So I don’t worry too much about losing the hard-problem consciousness, as I generally believe it’s just “being made of physical stuff which Actually Exists in a privileged sense”.
The thing is, this answer to the hard problem of consciousness has kind of weird results relating to eating food. Because it means eating food is a form of uploading! you transfer your chemical processes to a new chunk of matter, and a previous chunk of matter is aggregated as waste product. That waste product was previously part of you, and if every particle has a discrete first-person-something-rather-than-nothing which is conserved, then when you eat food you are “waking up” previously sleeping matter, and the waste matter goes to sleep, forgetting near everything about you into thermal noise!
“Easy” problem
So there’s still an interesting problem to resolve—and in fact what I’ve said resolves almost nothing; it only answers camp #2, providing what I hope is an argument for why they should become primarily interested in camp #1. In camp #1 terms, we can discuss information theory or causal properties about whether the information or causal chain that makes up the things those first-person-perspective-units ie particles are information theoretically “aware of” or “know” things about their environment; we can ask causal questions—eg, “is my red your red?” can instead be “assume my red is your red if there is no experiment which can distinguish them, so can we find such an experiment?”—in which case, I don’t worry about losing even the camp #1 form of selfhood-consciousness from sleep, because my brain is overwhelmingly unchanged from sleep and stopping activations and whole-brain synchronization of state doesn’t mean it can’t be restarted.
It’s still possible that every point in spacetime has a separate first-person-something-rather-than-nothing-”consciousness”/”existence”, in which case maybe actually even causally identical shapes of particles/physical stuff in my brain which are my neurons representing “a perception of red in the center of my visual field in the past 100ms” are a different qualia than the same ones at a different infinitesimal timestep, or are different qualia than if the exact same shape of particles occurred in your brain. But it seems even less possible to get traction on that metaphysical question than on the question of the origin of first-person-something-rather-than-nothing, and since I don’t know of there being any great answers to something-rather-than-nothing, I figure we probably won’t ever be able to know. (Also, our neurons for red are, in fact, slightly different. I expect the practical difference is small.)
But that either doesn’t resolve or at least partially backs OP’s point, about timesteps/timeslices already potentially being different selves in some strong sense, due to ~lack of causal access across time, or so. Since the thing I’m proposing also says non-interacting particles in equilibrium have an inactive-yet-still-real first-person-something-rather-than-nothing, then even rocks or whatever you’re on top of right now or your keyboard keys carry the bare-fact-of-existence, and so my preference for not dying can’t be about the particles making me up continuing to exist—they cannot be destroyed, thanks to conservation laws of the universe, only rearranged—and my preference is instead about the integrated awareness of all of these particles, where they are shaped and moving in patterns which are working together in a synchronized, evolution-refined, self-regenerating dance we call “being alive”. And so it’s perfectly true that the matter that makes me up can implement any preference about what successor shapes are valid.
Unwantable preferences?
On the other hand, to disagree with OP a bit, I think there’s more objective truth to the matter about what humans prefer than that. Evolution should create very robust preferences for some kinds of thing, such as having some sort of successor state which is still able to maintain autopoesis. I think it’s actually so highly evolutionarily unfit to not want that that it’s almost unwantable for an evolved being to not want there to be some informationally related autopoietic patterns continuing in the future.
Eg, consider suicide—even suicidal people would be horrified by the idea that all humans would die if they died, and I suspect that suicide is an (incredibly high cost, please avoid it if at all possible!) adaptation that has been preserved because there are very rare cases where it can be increase the inclusive fitness of a group the organism arose from (but I generally believe it almost never is a best strategy, so if anyone reads this who is thinking about it, please be aware I think it’s a terribly high cost way to solve whatever problem makes it come to mind, and there are almost certainly tractable better options—poke me if a nerd like me can ever give useful input); but I bring it up because it means, while you can maybe consider the rest of humanity or life on earth to be not sufficiently “you” in an information theory sense that dying suddenly becomes fine, it seems to me to be at least one important reason that suicide is ever acceptable to anyone at all; if they knew they were the last organism I feel like even a maximally suicidal person would want to stick it out for as long as possible, because if all other life forms are dead they’d want to preserve the last gasp of the legacy of life? idk.
But yeah, the only constraints on what you want are what physics permits matter to encode and what you already want. You probably can’t just decide to want any old thing, because you already want something different than that. Other than that objection, I think I basically agree with OP.