Here’s what I think. It’s just a “mysterious answer to a mysterious question” but it’s the best I can come up with.
From the perspective of a simulated person, they are conscious. A ‘perspective’ is defined by a mapping of certain properties of the simulated person to abstract, non-uniquely determined ‘mental properties’.
Perspectives and mental properties do not exist (that’s the whole point—they’re subjective!) It’s a category mistake to ask: does this thing have a perspective? Things don’t “have” perspectives the way they have position or mass. All we can ask is: “From this perspective (which might even be the perspective of a thermostat), how does the world look?”
The difference between a person in a simulation and a ‘real person’ is that defining the perspective of a real person is slightly ‘easier’, slightly ‘more natural’. But if the simulated and real versions are ‘functionally isomorphic’ then any perspective we assign to one can be mapped onto the other in a canonical way. (And having pointed these two facts out, we thereby exhaust everything there is to be said about whether simulated people are ‘really conscious’.)
ETA: I’m actually really interested to know what the downvoter thinks. I mean, I know these ideas are absurd but I can’t see any other way to piece it together. To clarify: what I’m trying to do is take the everyday concept of “what it’s likeness” as far as it will go without either (a) committing myself to a bunch of arbitrary extra facts (such as ‘the exact moment when a person first becomes conscious’ and ‘facts of the matter’ about whether ants/lizards/mice/etc are conscious) or (b) ditching it in favour of a wholly ‘third person’ Dennettian notion of consciousness. (If the criticism is simply that I ought to ditch it in favour of Dennett-style consciousness then I have no reply (ultimately I agree!) but you’re kind-of missing the point of the exercise.)
Here’s what I think. It’s just a “mysterious answer to a mysterious question” but it’s the best I can come up with.
From the perspective of a simulated person, they are conscious. A ‘perspective’ is defined by a mapping of certain properties of the simulated person to abstract, non-uniquely determined ‘mental properties’.
Perspectives and mental properties do not exist (that’s the whole point—they’re subjective!) It’s a category mistake to ask: does this thing have a perspective? Things don’t “have” perspectives the way they have position or mass. All we can ask is: “From this perspective (which might even be the perspective of a thermostat), how does the world look?”
The difference between a person in a simulation and a ‘real person’ is that defining the perspective of a real person is slightly ‘easier’, slightly ‘more natural’. But if the simulated and real versions are ‘functionally isomorphic’ then any perspective we assign to one can be mapped onto the other in a canonical way. (And having pointed these two facts out, we thereby exhaust everything there is to be said about whether simulated people are ‘really conscious’.)
ETA: I’m actually really interested to know what the downvoter thinks. I mean, I know these ideas are absurd but I can’t see any other way to piece it together. To clarify: what I’m trying to do is take the everyday concept of “what it’s likeness” as far as it will go without either (a) committing myself to a bunch of arbitrary extra facts (such as ‘the exact moment when a person first becomes conscious’ and ‘facts of the matter’ about whether ants/lizards/mice/etc are conscious) or (b) ditching it in favour of a wholly ‘third person’ Dennettian notion of consciousness. (If the criticism is simply that I ought to ditch it in favour of Dennett-style consciousness then I have no reply (ultimately I agree!) but you’re kind-of missing the point of the exercise.)