You created a superposition of a million consciousnesses and then outputted an aggregate value about all those consciousnesses. Either a million entities experienced a conscious experience, or you can find out the output of a conscious being with ever actually creating a conscious being—i.e. p-zombies exist (or at least aggregated p-zombies).
You can find out some aggregate property of the output of functions that have equivalent output to a million conscious beings. It is far from obvious that this is equivalent to there actually being a million conscious beings, or even one conscious being.
Also, equivalence of one output is definitely not the same thing as equivalence of consciousness, as even a moment’s thought will show.
You created a superposition of a million consciousnesses and then outputted an aggregate value about all those consciousnesses.
This I agree with.
Either a million entities experienced a conscious experience, or you can find out the output of a conscious being with ever actually creating a conscious being—i.e. p-zombies exist (or at least aggregated p-zombies).
This I do not. You do not get access to a million entities by the argument I laid out previously. You did not simulate all of them. And you did not create something that behaves like a million entities aggregated either, just like you cannot store 2^n classical bits on a quantum computer consisting of n qbits. You get a function which outputs an aggregated value of your superposition, but you can’t recover each consciousness you pretend to have been simulated from it. Therefore this is what I believe is flawed in your position:
it seems reasonable to extend that to something which act exactly the same as an aggregate of conscious beings—it must in fact be an aggregate of conscious beings
If I understand your arguments correctly (which I may not, in which case I’ll be happy to stand corrected), this sentence should mean to you that for something to act the same as an aggregate of n conscious beings, it must be an aggregate of at least n conscious beings? But then doesn’t this view mean that a function of d variables can never be reduced to a function of k variables, k < d?
You created a superposition of a million consciousnesses and then outputted an aggregate value about all those consciousnesses. Either a million entities experienced a conscious experience, or you can find out the output of a conscious being with ever actually creating a conscious being—i.e. p-zombies exist (or at least aggregated p-zombies).
You can find out some aggregate property of the output of functions that have equivalent output to a million conscious beings. It is far from obvious that this is equivalent to there actually being a million conscious beings, or even one conscious being.
Also, equivalence of one output is definitely not the same thing as equivalence of consciousness, as even a moment’s thought will show.
This I agree with.
This I do not. You do not get access to a million entities by the argument I laid out previously. You did not simulate all of them. And you did not create something that behaves like a million entities aggregated either, just like you cannot store 2^n classical bits on a quantum computer consisting of n qbits. You get a function which outputs an aggregated value of your superposition, but you can’t recover each consciousness you pretend to have been simulated from it. Therefore this is what I believe is flawed in your position:
If I understand your arguments correctly (which I may not, in which case I’ll be happy to stand corrected), this sentence should mean to you that for something to act the same as an aggregate of n conscious beings, it must be an aggregate of at least n conscious beings? But then doesn’t this view mean that a function of d variables can never be reduced to a function of k variables, k < d?