I think the idea is that you can’t pick a different interpretation for the rock implementing a specific computation for each instant of time. A convincing narrative of the physical processes in a rock instantiating a consciousness would require a mapping from rock states to the computational process of the consciousness that remains stable over time. With the physical processes going on in rocks being pretty much random, you wouldn’t get the moment-to-moment coherence you’d need for this even if you can come up with interpretations for single instants.
One intuition here is that once you come up with a good interpretation, the physical system needs to be able to come up with correct results from computations that go on longer than where you extrapolated doing your interpretation. If you try to get around the single instant thing and make a tortured interpretation of rock states representing the computation of, say, 100 consecutive computations of the consciousness, the interpretation is going to have the rock give you garbage for computation 101. You’re just doing the computation yourself now and painstakingly fitting things to random physical noise in the rock.
I think the idea is that you can’t pick a different interpretation for the rock implementing a specific computation for each instant of time. A convincing narrative of the physical processes in a rock instantiating a consciousness would require a mapping from rock states to the computational process of the consciousness that remains stable over time. With the physical processes going on in rocks being pretty much random, you wouldn’t get the moment-to-moment coherence you’d need for this even if you can come up with interpretations for single instants.
One intuition here is that once you come up with a good interpretation, the physical system needs to be able to come up with correct results from computations that go on longer than where you extrapolated doing your interpretation. If you try to get around the single instant thing and make a tortured interpretation of rock states representing the computation of, say, 100 consecutive computations of the consciousness, the interpretation is going to have the rock give you garbage for computation 101. You’re just doing the computation yourself now and painstakingly fitting things to random physical noise in the rock.