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 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.