Well, Hamlet doesn’t really exist in our universe, so my plan for now is to not consider him a consciousness worth caring about. But if you start to deal with harder cases, whether it exists in our universe becomes a trickier question.
But if you start to deal with harder cases, whether it exists in our universe becomes a trickier question.
To me this is simply empirical. Is the computational theory of consciousness true without reservation? Then if the computation exists in our universe, the consciousness exists. Perhaps it’s only partially true, and more complex computations, or computations that take longer to run, have less of a sense of consciousness, and therefore it exists, but
Here’s an analogy—is Hamlet conscious?
Well, Hamlet doesn’t really exist in our universe, so my plan for now is to not consider him a consciousness worth caring about. But if you start to deal with harder cases, whether it exists in our universe becomes a trickier question.
To me this is simply empirical. Is the computational theory of consciousness true without reservation? Then if the computation exists in our universe, the consciousness exists. Perhaps it’s only partially true, and more complex computations, or computations that take longer to run, have less of a sense of consciousness, and therefore it exists, but