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#5734·Vincent Brunsch, 13 days agoSuppose we eventually can write complete generative programs for both a crow and a human. You say that the human program “would result in consciousness.”
I agree that this follows from your theory if universal creativity entails consciousness. But then I don’t think it can also serve as an independent argument for that connection. The possibility of a universally creative philosophical zombie is ruled out by your theory, rather than independently by the fact that the program is universally creative.
Likewise, your theory predicts that the crow program would be unconscious if it remains non-universal. Competing theories of consciousness could make different predictions about the same two programs. For example, IIT explicitly allows functionally equivalent systems to differ in consciousness depending on their intrinsic causal organization. I’m not assuming IIT is correct. It just illustrates that knowing what the two programs can do would not by itself decide which theory of consciousness is correct.
So I think the simulation comparison inherits the disagreement about which theory of consciousness is correct; it does not by itself resolve the link between universal creativity and phenomenal experience.
Rival predictions don’t keep a question open. By that standard, the question of whether rocks or thermostats are conscious stays open too. IIT gives some consciousness even to a photodiode, and panpsychism gives it to everything. That rival theories predict different things doesn’t leave a question undecided, or no question would ever be decided. What settles it is which rivals survive criticism.