Can qualia be separated from personhood?
Showing only ideas leading to #4752 and its comments.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.(3) The programs rendering the apple imagery must be looping until stopped, since they could not have advance knowledge of when the stimulus stops.
(4) The programs rendering the apple are not people, so cannot themselves constitute experience.
(5) Repeated running of the same fixed program, not being a person, does not make it a person.
(6) Repeated running of the same fixed program is automatic, requires no creativity, and cannot constitute experience.
PROBLEM: Why are we conscious of the apple rendering? Given (6), why is there an experience of it, if the programs comprising it are looping, and so are therefore predefined?
SOLUTION: The apple programs are not the same programs one execution to the next. They are being re-evolved every time they are run. This evolution is what the person is doing, and so must be what gives rise to the experience consisting of the apple rendering.
This implies that no two instances of experience, even if seemingly identical, are caused by the same programs.
Is all conscious experience not the running of programs, but computation that is realizing the evolution of programs? Computation which cannot be abstracted to any program, then? So in what sense can a person "be programmed"? Is personhood computational, but "non-programmatic"?
SOLUTION: The apple programs give rise to consciousness only in a given context. Only when run a certain why, by a person.
This suggests that programs can be “run differently” to result in a different computation. This is false because it violates Substrate Independence: the instantiation of a program is unaffected by its physical implementation. If a “context” changes what the program is computing, then that’s a different program. Suggesting that a person running the apple programs “makes them” conscious therefore is not sound. The programs are either conscious or not. If they were, by (A1), they would be people.