Can qualia be separated from personhood?
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Assumption A1: Only programs that are people can, while running, constitute qualia/experience/subjectivity/consciousness.
A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times. That looping program is not a person: it can only create whatever knowledge it originally did, not any possible knowledge, maybe until freed from the loop. Yet it still constitutes experience.
So people are not the only programs that can be qualia.
A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times.
How do you know this?
Assuming qualia are classical, there is nothing stopping every step in the computation comprising them from being measured, like any computation. Then, nothing is stopping that recording/program from being rerun.
This is true, but assumes that "qualiation" still occurs when each subsequent state is pre-existing and determined. Do we know this? What if qualiation somehow depends on the (computational) indeterminacy of the subsequent states..?
Is a quale a sequence of information states? Is this true of any given computation? Does the quale "care" if the states are computed afresh or read from memory?
That's what I get for suddenly returning to this discussion after a long gap. I was thinking that any computation can be recorded and re-run at will, in principle. So qualia can too. But indeed, I have suggested in this discussion that it is the evolution of programs that causes experience, and evolution cannot be scripted. This means a quale that is recorded will not "qualiate" if it is rerun exactly as recorded.
TL;DR: I don't.
My suspicion remains that creativity and qualia come from some kind of blind exchange between layers of emergence, of which mutations and mistakes in copying, as seen in DNA, are an example.
Actually maybe this isn't so obvious. A person need not create new knowledge for the personhood property to be present, since it is a counterfactual property: a person can create new knowledge (new and non-inferable, I argue).
True that a person need not create new knowledge, but a looping quale is not a person, per #5035, so the claim survives this criticism.
If qualia are only present when new knowledge is being made, then for a quale to be replayed it could be that there must be a reset each time: the knowledge produced from the previous run is erased. So w.r.t. the AGI system alone, new knowledge is being created each time (it doesn't matter if the knowledge is copied from a previous run and stored elsewhere, in which case it is not new w.r.t. that combined system).
A looping quale is also not a person because personhood is not just: can create a given piece of new knowledge, it is: can create any knowledge (not just that created by this quale; again assuming knowledge creation defines qualia).
Should clarify that personhood is: can create any new knowledge in principle (excluding resource constraints). A program consisting of a looping quale cannot create any possible knowledge, whether or not it is creating some each time it's run.