Strongly agree with this. How I frame the issue: If people want to say that they identify as an “experiencer” who is necessarily conscious, and don’t identify with any nonconscious instances of their cognition, then they’re free to do that from an egoistic perspective. But from an impartial perspective, what matters is how your cognition influences the world. Your cognition has no direct access to information about whether it’s conscious such that it could condition on this and give different outputs when instantiated as conscious vs. nonconscious.
Note that in the case where some simulator deliberately creates a behavioural replica of a (possibly nonexistent) conscious agent, consciousness does enter into the chain of logical causality for why the behavioural replica says things about its conscious experience. Specifically, the role it plays is to explain what sort of behaviour the simulator is motivated to replicate. So many (or even all) non-counterfactual instances of your cognition being nonconscious doesn’t seem to violate any Follow the Improbability heuristic.
Strongly agree with this. How I frame the issue: If people want to say that they identify as an “experiencer” who is necessarily conscious, and don’t identify with any nonconscious instances of their cognition, then they’re free to do that from an egoistic perspective. But from an impartial perspective, what matters is how your cognition influences the world. Your cognition has no direct access to information about whether it’s conscious such that it could condition on this and give different outputs when instantiated as conscious vs. nonconscious.
Note that in the case where some simulator deliberately creates a behavioural replica of a (possibly nonexistent) conscious agent, consciousness does enter into the chain of logical causality for why the behavioural replica says things about its conscious experience. Specifically, the role it plays is to explain what sort of behaviour the simulator is motivated to replicate. So many (or even all) non-counterfactual instances of your cognition being nonconscious doesn’t seem to violate any Follow the Improbability heuristic.