Yeah, that approach seems overcomplicated to me. We shouldn’t ask whether a chunk of matter or information “contains” a conscious mind, we should ask how much it contributes to the experiences of a conscious mind. The most obvious answer is that the contribution depends on how easy it is to compute the mind given that chunk of matter or information, or vice versa. Of course I’m handwaving a lot here, but having actual causal arrows in the territory doesn’t seem to be required, you just need laws of physics that are simple to compute.
Yeah, that approach seems overcomplicated to me. We shouldn’t ask whether a chunk of matter or information “contains” a conscious mind, we should ask how much it contributes to the experiences of a conscious mind. The most obvious answer is that the contribution depends on how easy it is to compute the mind given that chunk of matter or information, or vice versa. Of course I’m handwaving a lot here, but having actual causal arrows in the territory doesn’t seem to be required, you just need laws of physics that are simple to compute.