Can qualia be separated from personhood?

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Tyler Mills’s avatar
Tyler MillsOP·​#4881·​
Only version leading to #5037 (3 total)

Assumption A1: Only programs that are people can, while running, constitute qualia/experience/subjectivity/consciousness.

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Tyler MillsOP·​#5038·​·​Criticism
2nd of 2 versions leading to #5037 (2 total)

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.

1 pending criticism Linked to by #5036
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Tyler MillsOP·​#5032·​·​Criticism of an earlier version

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).

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Tyler MillsOP·​#5037·​·​Criticism

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.

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