What’s it like to be simulated in homomorphically encrypted form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption)---so that someone who saw the entire computation (including its inputs and outputs), and only lacked a faraway decryption key, would have no clue that the whole thing is isomorphic to what your brain is doing?
What’s it like to be simulated by a reversible computer, and immediately “uncomputed”? Would you undergo the exact same set of experiences twice? Or once “forwards” and then once “backwards” (whatever that means)? Or, since the computation leaves no trace of its ever having happened, and is “just a convoluted implementation of the identity function,” would you not experience anything?
Once the code of your brain is stored in a computer, why would anyone even have to bother running the code to evoke your subjective experience? And what counts as running it? Is it enough to do a debugging trace with pen and paper?
Suppose that, purely for internal error-correction purposes, a computer actually “executes” you three times in parallel, then outputs the MAJORITY of the results. Is there now one conscious entity or three? (Or maybe 7, for every nonempty subset of executions?)
Crucially, unlike some philosophers (e.g. John Searle), I don’t pound the table and declare it “obvious” that there’s nothing that it’s like to be simulated in the strange ways above. All I say is that I don’t think I have any idea what it’s like, in even the same imperfect way that I can imagine what it’s like to be another human being (or even, say, an unclonable extraterrestrial) by analogy with my own case. And that’s why I’m not as troubled as some people are, if some otherwise-plausible cosmological theory predicts that the overwhelming majority of “copies” of me should be Boltzmann brains, computer simulations, etc. I view that as a sign, not that I’m almost certainly a copy (though I might be), but simply that I don’t yet know the right way to think about this issue, and maybe that there’s a good reason (lack of freebits??) why the supposed “copies” shouldn’t even be included in my reference class.
Alright, consider the following questions:
What’s it like to be simulated in homomorphically encrypted form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption)---so that someone who saw the entire computation (including its inputs and outputs), and only lacked a faraway decryption key, would have no clue that the whole thing is isomorphic to what your brain is doing?
What’s it like to be simulated by a reversible computer, and immediately “uncomputed”? Would you undergo the exact same set of experiences twice? Or once “forwards” and then once “backwards” (whatever that means)? Or, since the computation leaves no trace of its ever having happened, and is “just a convoluted implementation of the identity function,” would you not experience anything?
Once the code of your brain is stored in a computer, why would anyone even have to bother running the code to evoke your subjective experience? And what counts as running it? Is it enough to do a debugging trace with pen and paper?
Suppose that, purely for internal error-correction purposes, a computer actually “executes” you three times in parallel, then outputs the MAJORITY of the results. Is there now one conscious entity or three? (Or maybe 7, for every nonempty subset of executions?)
Crucially, unlike some philosophers (e.g. John Searle), I don’t pound the table and declare it “obvious” that there’s nothing that it’s like to be simulated in the strange ways above. All I say is that I don’t think I have any idea what it’s like, in even the same imperfect way that I can imagine what it’s like to be another human being (or even, say, an unclonable extraterrestrial) by analogy with my own case. And that’s why I’m not as troubled as some people are, if some otherwise-plausible cosmological theory predicts that the overwhelming majority of “copies” of me should be Boltzmann brains, computer simulations, etc. I view that as a sign, not that I’m almost certainly a copy (though I might be), but simply that I don’t yet know the right way to think about this issue, and maybe that there’s a good reason (lack of freebits??) why the supposed “copies” shouldn’t even be included in my reference class.