The idea that a consciousness can exist within an alternate reading frame on a system that is not conscious in my own frame, as Peer exists within the City, does significant violence to my intuitions about consciousness.
How about, instead of an opaquely described “alternate reading frame”, we consider homomorphic encryption. Take some uploads in a closed environment, homomorphically encrypt the whole thing, throw away the decryption key, and then start it running. I think this matches Peer’s situation in all relevant aspects: The information about the uploads exists in the ordinary computational basis (not talking Dust Theory here), and there is a short and fast program to extract it, but it’s computationally intractable to find that program if you don’t know the secret. The difference is that this way it’s much more obvious what that secret would look like.
Yeah, I basically agree, and that does less violence to my intuitions on the subject… still more evidence, were it needed, that my intuitions on the subject are unreliable.
Indeed, I’m not even sure how relevant the computational intractability of breaking the encryption is. That is, I’m not actually sure how Peer’s situation is relevantly different from my own with respect to someone sitting in another building somewhere… what matters about both of them is simply that we aren’t interacting with one another in any important way.
The degree to which the counterfactual story about how we might interact with one another seems plausible is relevant to my intuitions about those consciousnesses, as you say, but it doesn’t seem at all relevant to anything outside of those intuitions.
How about, instead of an opaquely described “alternate reading frame”, we consider homomorphic encryption. Take some uploads in a closed environment, homomorphically encrypt the whole thing, throw away the decryption key, and then start it running. I think this matches Peer’s situation in all relevant aspects: The information about the uploads exists in the ordinary computational basis (not talking Dust Theory here), and there is a short and fast program to extract it, but it’s computationally intractable to find that program if you don’t know the secret. The difference is that this way it’s much more obvious what that secret would look like.
Yeah, I basically agree, and that does less violence to my intuitions on the subject… still more evidence, were it needed, that my intuitions on the subject are unreliable.
Indeed, I’m not even sure how relevant the computational intractability of breaking the encryption is. That is, I’m not actually sure how Peer’s situation is relevantly different from my own with respect to someone sitting in another building somewhere… what matters about both of them is simply that we aren’t interacting with one another in any important way.
The degree to which the counterfactual story about how we might interact with one another seems plausible is relevant to my intuitions about those consciousnesses, as you say, but it doesn’t seem at all relevant to anything outside of those intuitions.