Can qualia be separated from personhood?
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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 suggests that all experience is determined by what programs are being subjected to evolution at any given time, the niches that are being adapted to. But why is not all creativity in the mind conscious? (All consciousness might necessarily be creativity).
Either there is no unconscious creativity, or only evolutionary/creative epochs with certain properties are conscious. The most obvious candidate for the property is complexity (in the sense of sophistication): only programs (existing knowledge) of a certain sophistication, once subjected to the evolutionary process, necessitates consciousness. Complex problem solving seems to require consciousness. Meanwhile, we do not seem to be conscious of "simpler" creative tasks, like... Like what? What is a "simple" creative task? What is an example of a creative task we perform unconsciously? How could we determine it was an act of creation (new knowledge), and not an act of deductive inference of the kind characterizing AI?
"No unconscious creativity" seems the simpler option. But here we arrive again at biological evolution, which is unconscious, yet is creating knowledge. Does this serve as a distinction between explanatory knowledge and non? Explanatory knowledge can only be created by a conscious process?
A person could create the same knowledge that biological evolution does, if only by simulating it. But it could still be true that only people can create explanatory knowledge. (That they can create all possible explanatory knowledge is Deutsch's criterion for personhood.)
only people can create explanatory knowledge
How is an LLM not creating new explanatory knowledge (even if worse than the existing, by any measure), by varying some existing written explanation? It could even vary and select by some criterion of its "choice", thus realizing Popperian epistemology.
Whatever new "explanations" it creates are derivable from (and by?) the knowledge in the training data. It isn't evolution if all of the variations and selection criteria are stored ahead of time. That's just a search process, as in the case of Move 37 per AlphaGo.
If only some of the criteria are stored, and the rest are random, is it still evolution? Is evolution only happening if there is random variation? But we could program an LLM to do that as well...
But an AI programmed to make random variations to its conjectures (English or otherwise) can only do so by choosing from an existing set of variations. Again, that knowledge is pre-existing. True evolution must involve variations to the substrate on which the knowledge is based; variations must be agnostic to the semantics of whatever they are acting upon, else they are already implicit from it, in which case their application does not constitute a truly novel conjecture (in the sense defining creativity).
Even if variations are agnostic to any meaning or context of the knowledge, why are they still not implicit? Anything is implicit from anything else, if implicit just means: follows from when a given change is applied... The whole question is where the change is coming from... (?)
This implies that no two instances of experience, even if seemingly identical, are caused by the same programs.
Actually this is not implied. One experience and an identical later one could be caused by the same program(s) being run again at a later time; if the program which is identical to the given experience is part of an "evolutionary personhood program", that still qualifies: If the second experience is identical, under the above solution that just means that the exact same evolutionary steps are taken in the second case. Maybe this would virtually never happen, but poses no problem of principle.
But why would the system ever re-evolve to the satisfaction of a niche already satisfied previously? If the programs evolved by the evolutionary aspect of the person already exist, there is no more need for evolution of them.
Because programs present in the system at one time could be no longer present at another time. Previously well-adapted programs could have decayed, been destroyed or consumed. So the same evolutionary path (approximately or not) could be travelled again, in principle.
The system may not have perfect knowledge of all programs present in it. The repeated independent emergence of winged flight in the biosphere comes to mind.
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"?
By the Church-Turing Thesis, all computation can be specified/programmed. So the evolutionary aspect of a person can be specified/programmed, if it is computational.
Programs could be evolved non-computationally. But that process could itself still be simulated, per the Church-Turing-Deutsch Thesis.
It could be simulated, but maybe it's very hard/intractable to do so. Maybe personhood harnesses physics to do the evolving, like a windmill harnesses the wind. Programs implemented such that the laws of physics cause them to evolve (unboundedly)?
But if the evolution is the defining feature of personhood, and the evolution is non-computational, then the personhood is non-computational. And consciousness would then not be a software property.
SOLUTION: The apple programs give rise to consciousness only in a given context. Only when run a certain way (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.