I think this is just playing around with definitions. Like many words, "life" is a nebulous category, with viruses and prions being borderline cases, but if you can say everything is life then the...
I think this is just playing around with definitions. Like many words, "life" is a nebulous category, with viruses and prions being borderline cases, but if you can say everything is life then the word is no longer useful.
Similarly for "consciousness," which is even more nebulous. Someday there might be a technical definition that doesn't quite line up with the one we use now, but it should match up for many obvious cases or it becomes another concept entirely.
Regarding defining the term "consciousness," I think you're spot on. I've had to dabble with defining it for various papers in philosophy and other classes over the last few years, and I have...
Regarding defining the term "consciousness," I think you're spot on. I've had to dabble with defining it for various papers in philosophy and other classes over the last few years, and I have never once been satisfied by what I've read in my research or written in my papers.
Every attempt at a definition seems to have one flaw or another in it that the idea's proponents hand-wave away, likely because they know how big a hole it blows in their argument. Maybe someday we'll have an all-encompassing, useful definition, but, until then, I think it's almost pointless to discuss it in technical terms unless you severely limit the meaning to be what we intuitively think of as consciousness.
Yes it is. They start from naive or overly broad definitions and arrive at incredible conclusions. But it’s interesting nevertheless, those are very smart people.
I think this is just playing around with definitions
Yes it is. They start from naive or overly broad definitions and arrive at incredible conclusions. But it’s interesting nevertheless, those are very smart people.
Nautilus seems to have a recurring problem with this. I rarely bother to read anymore when I see one of their articles here or on HackerNews, because I've learned to expect that their incredible...
Nautilus seems to have a recurring problem with this. I rarely bother to read anymore when I see one of their articles here or on HackerNews, because I've learned to expect that their incredible titles about new physics or some other huge new idea are typically just that: not credible.
This all strikes me as metaphysical muddling of language. Either we redefine ‘consciousness’ to include the states we observe in particles such as electrons (which would seem to devalue the...
This all strikes me as metaphysical muddling of language. Either we redefine ‘consciousness’ to include the states we observe in particles such as electrons (which would seem to devalue the meaning of consciousness to the point of uselessness) or we decide to use language appropriately and describe physics in terms of physical models that physicists already have at their disposal, including spin, charge, electric force, radiation etc.
It’s impossible to refute the claim that electrons, other subatomic particles, or other non living materials are internally aware of their surroundings and have inner experiences—we can’t exactly interrogate these objects. The fact that we don’t observe such things as electrons changing states of consciousness (like we do with higher order life forms which become unconscious during sleep, or when in comas, or when they die) suggests to me that the panpsychist’s notion of consciousness isn’t physically real (an option I’m willing to accept, but only with evidence), or it’s so mundane as to not be a useful state to be of interest. That is to say, if everything is conscious, it seems rather useless to use descriptively.
If what’s actually interesting about consciousness is some observable scale of information theoretic dynamism, at one end of which we place higher degrees of consciousness such as manifested in animals, then I feel like there is still linguistic utility in limiting what we consider to be conscious to those objects that are complex enough to exhibit that higher degree. If we use language as a naive lens through which to model reality, we have an antonym of consciousness in that of unconsciousness. If it is more useful to model consciousness as a scale that is not polar (i.e., there is no pole of ‘unconscious’), I’ve yet to see the utility in doing so. It seems to me there is utility in separating things into discrete classes, such as separating the unconscious (door-knobs and bricks) from say the marginally conscious (yeast or sunflowers), from the conscious (bats and squids), from again the highly conscious (humans and great apes). I would challenge anyone who believes in panpsychism to explain where electrons or stars fit on such a scale—or if the belief is that there is no scale, explain why we seem to be able to observe clustering of phenomena associated with different life forms of varying complexity with some consistent, relative ordering.
Thank you for sharing. I like this idea a lot, especially the iterative behavior that Whitehead prescribes to particles; feels quite postmodern. The article brings up a lot of good points about...
Thank you for sharing. I like this idea a lot, especially the iterative behavior that Whitehead prescribes to particles; feels quite postmodern.
What Dyson is getting at in his remark about electrons and quantum theory is that the probabilistic distribution-outcomes of quantum experiments (like the double-slit experiment) are better explained as the product, not of pure chance (another way of saying “we don’t know”), but of numerous highly rudimentary choices by each electron in each moment about where and how to manifest. [...]
Rather than being unchanging things moving around in a container of space-time—the modern view in a nutshell—Whitehead conceives of particles like electrons as a chain of successive iterations of a single electron that bear a strong likeness to each other in each iteration, but are not identical to each other. Each iteration is a little different than the last. There is no static and unchanging electron. The degree to which each iteration is more or less different than the last iteration is the place for an iota of choice, and mind. This iota of choice compounds upwards and, through the course of biological evolution, results in the complex types of mind and choice that we humans and other mammals enjoy.
The article brings up a lot of good points about the "spectrum" that life exists on, i.e. that it is much more of a gray area than many people assume. We make the cutoff somewhere around viruses in accordance with our rules for life, but clearly the fact that these figures of liminality exist at all is an indication that a binary is not necessarily a good way of classifying them. It follows that consciousness, as an emergent quality of the processes of life, represents a similarly spectral characteristic, and further that this spectrum can be extended to include, in some sense, everything that we can observe. There cannot be two spectra; if one end is "un-consciousness" (i.e. void; absence as a physical quality, the "thing" that is absolutely, definitely the least conscious in the universe) and the other end is "arbitrary maximum consciousness," then by definition everything that has a material existence is at least somewhat more conscious than the un-conscious; if it were equally so then it would be the un-conscious.
Perhaps anecdotes are a little unscientific of me, but, well, this is ~humanities. I've always felt the dichotomy between life and un-life, between qualia and otherwise that we consider ourselves to live in an irreconcilable one. The insane level on which quantum physics appears to operate is not compatible with the classical models that assume subjectivity in ourselves (perception, etc.) and objectivity elsewhere. If our observation alone of a particle is what determines its "state," then on some level it is acting of its own accord. Further, if this process is "random," as we seem to think it is, and therefore cannot be predicted, how can it fit into our perception of inanimate matter as quantitative, unchanging, and predictable? Controllable? Evidently it controls itself, on an atomic and subatomic level, and I think that certainly merits it the title of "just barely conscious."
Individual quantum interactions have random outcomes, but the distributions of the random outcomes are constrained by physics in known ways, and many random outcomes from known distributions...
Further, if this process is "random," as we seem to think it is, and therefore cannot be predicted, how can it fit into our perception of inanimate matter as quantitative, unchanging, and predictable?
Individual quantum interactions have random outcomes, but the distributions of the random outcomes are constrained by physics in known ways, and many random outcomes from known distributions compounded together usually have predictable results. If you flip a coin a million times, then there's a 95% chance you're going to get heads between 499,000 and 501,000 times. A speck of dust has over a hundred quadrillion atoms, so the randomness of its quantum interactions is filed off and it's very predictable at macroscopic scales.
Not to this little black duck. For starters, the article connects consciousness with choice, and then connects choice to action. But the ability to choose is not inherently a property of...
For Whitehead, all actual entities, including electrons, atoms, and molecules, are “drops of experience” in that they enjoy at least a little bit of experience, a little bit of awareness. At first blush it’s a strange perspective but eventually makes a great deal of sense.
Not to this little black duck.
For starters, the article connects consciousness with choice, and then connects choice to action. But the ability to choose is not inherently a property of consciousness; being conscious is the only requirement for consciousness. So, even if an electron were to conscious, that would just mean it's aware of itself and its surroundings. It doesn't mean that it can change anything about its surroundings, or that it can even make a choice. An aware electron might simply be aware of its orbit in an atom, endlessly whirling around the nucleus. It might simply be aware of its orbit as "business as usual" and be content with that. Or it might be screaming at its inability to change its orbit by even one Planck length, and be trapped in an eternal hell (like the man in 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)'.
Consciousness is not choice. Choice is not action. The writer talks about "how we can turn these 'merely' philosophical considerations about the nature of mind throughout nature into a testable set of experiments", but those experiments only test for an entity's ability to change its behaviour, not for whether it's conscious.
Then there's the matter of whether an electron can have consciousness. How? What physical substrate would this consciousness reside in? Ours resides in a highly complex arrangement of matter, consisting of a hundred billion of cells, connected trillions of ways. Does the electron's consciousness arise from its complex structure? As far as we know, an electron is an elementary particle: it has no component particles. It is what it is, whole and entire. Where's the complexity?
This leads us to the likelihood that consciousness is not material. We're now in the realm of souls: an immaterial consciousness. We haven't proven that our consciousness is immaterial. Why would we assume that an electron has a soul if we don't?
I find this whole concept very difficult to swallow.
I think it may be useful to split apart the concepts of consciousness and self-awareness like this: Self-awareness being the algorithm that our brain computes. Given enough time, technology, and...
Exemplary
Then there's the matter of whether an electron can have consciousness. How? What physical substrate would this consciousness reside in? Ours resides in a highly complex arrangement of matter, consisting of a hundred billion of cells, connected trillions of ways.
I think it may be useful to split apart the concepts of consciousness and self-awareness like this:
Self-awareness being the algorithm that our brain computes. Given enough time, technology, and dedicated people, we could conceivably dissect a human brain until we figured out this exact algorithm. We could implement it on a computer, and get human-identical behavior. (If we gave it a robot body that looked identical to a human's, then other people and it itself might not realize it was any different from a regular human.) This is the thing that electrons, rocks, plants, worms, and most simple animal life clearly do not have.
Consciousness would be the mysterious quality that seems likely to be shared by all animal life (and maybe more). It feels likely that even a worm with a couple neurons would have a "point of view" / "what it's like to be a worm" / "internal experience". It feels like there's some sense in which you could have been born as a worm or anything else with consciousness instead of a human, and it was just down to chance you were born as a human. It feels likely that we could dissect a brain (either a complex human brain, or a simple worm brain that's little more than some senses connected to a pile of logic gate-like neurons connected to some motor outputs), figure out everything about how it processes things internally, and yet not find out anything more about this quality as it seems to exist in ourselves. (You might think you could view a brain thinking about "consciousness", and trace the neurons back to find the cause of the thoughts, but it might be that the cause is just pre-programmed instincts that were shaped by evolution for some interesting reason that's not discernible by looking at one brain. The presence of that instinct may or may not be sufficient and/or necessary for consciousness; the instinct may be some reflection of something about how the world works, that was put in us by some evolutionary pressure and/or something to do with the Anthropic principle; if the instinct was necessary for consciousness, we would only find ourselves as life with it, and when looking at our evolutionary history, it would be likely that we see some other evolutionary pressure that pushed us to have it, even though in some sense it wasn't the true cause for us to have it.) It's the thing that even if we built a fully intelligent and human-like AI while understanding every bit of its operation, we might be unsure whether the AI has it (and unsure about whether that really matters at all, given that the AI acts the same either way, expresses itself like a normal human, and biological people and AIs who have been rebuilt with their memories into each other's forms don't report any difference in their experience of consciousness).
Some possibilities:
Consciousness is something that emerges purely from self-awareness (or the simpler feedback loops shared with simpler life), and really has no mysterious component that's not just a logical result of an implementation of self-awareness. Consciousness isn't a basic feature of the universe any more than thermostats are. Anything that computes self-awareness, including an AI, necessarily has consciousness, and there's no sense in which something without self-awareness could be considered conscious. If we study self-awareness enough, we will actually figure out that it is the full cause of the experience of consciousness. Consciousness is just a tag in our own mind for our own experience that feels mysterious in our mind, but that feeling of mystery doesn't actually correspond to anything deeper in the world than the fact you exist. This is the reductionist position held by Daniel Dennett.
Consciousness is an ontologically-basic feature of the universe that is unrelated to self-awareness (but may be composed with it) that everything has. This is the panpsychism position. It may be that consciousness is amplified/generated/associated more with the information content, processing ability, or feedback loops of a system rather than say specific particles. A system doesn't have to be self-aware to be conscious: a rock as a set of particles that push and pull on each other and move together may be recognized as having internal experience, even if an utterly empty one compared to ours. This idea explores a way that consciousness could be a basic feature of the universe, but without violating the Copernican principle and assuming that the feature is perfectly fit or exclusive to human self-awareness.
I think the reductionist position works well for most pragmatic matters, especially when considering things like AI and mind-uploading. If there is a magic bit, an AI without it will never know, a human that uploads themselves into a machine won't even know they lost the magic bit, and an uploaded human that is reassembled into a meat brain won't know whether they got the magic bit back, so it doesn't feel like something that can have an effect on the world.
But It feels like it's leaving something unexplained, though it's extremely hard to point at what it's leaving unexplained. Here's some open problems that I'd hope a more complete theory could address. Most of these have to do with perspective or point of view, which I think is a big part of what we mean when we say "consciousness".
It seems like a better theory of consciousness could show us the exact limits and ways that the Anthropic principle must be applied. There seem to be valid ways to use the Anthropic principle ("it's no surprise that we find ourselves on a planet capable of supporting life, because we must or else we wouldn't exist or we'd find ourselves as life somewhere else on a planet that did") and invalid ways to use the Anthropic principle ("it's no surprise that we find ourselves on a planet with a moon with the exact properties as ours, because we must or else we'd find ourselves as a different kind of life on a planet without a moon exactly like ours") that are hard to differentiate by any clear principle, and there are situations where it's totally unclear how to apply the Anthropic principle.
Related to the Anthropic principle, it seems very unclear to reason about probabilities that we should find ourselves as any specific person. I feel comfortable with statements like "I could have been born as someone else somewhere else in the world" and "Given that you're born a human, the chance of being born in the US is (population of US divided by the total population)", but I have no idea how to reason about questions like "What is the chance of being born as a cat, an AI, a worm, a bacteria, or a rock instead of a human?", "What is the chance of being born in the 20th century?", or judging between the Doomsday Paradox vs the Presumptuous Philosophers (or anything else on that page).
I think UDASSA gives a very high-level framework that might describe our reality where these problems would conceivably all have specific concrete answers, but the principle doesn't give any way to efficiently compute answers like these besides brute-forcing the execution of the distribution of all possible universes under it and seeing how these questions turn out over the distribution.
Extremely half-baked idea that hints to a model where consciousness could exist immaterially as an entanglement between our perspective and the laws of the universe: If you presume a constantly-forking universe that makes new branches/timelines for different possible outcomes (which MWI proponents argue Quantum Mechanics directly implies) where different people can have different subjective measure (probability) of the same outcomes (which I believe QM has been shown to imply), and then went a step further and imagined that the "true"/"raw" physics of reality constantly picked from a set of rules to follow one at random at each step, and only a subset of rules allowed the continuation of life, then by the Anthropic principle, we would constantly find ourselves down the small probability branches where chance has continually picked rules compatible with life. In this view, consciousness could be defined as anything with a point-of-view that from its own point-of-view, through the Anthropic principle is seemingly able to exert a pressure on the physics of the world to keep operating in a way compatible with its own existence. Presumably this could be everything, including individual electrons, but maybe by some logic it's even more true of rich feedback loops like those that make up self-awareness. (Ugh I've seen an article before discussing this exact idea, but I've lost the link. The idea is slightly related to some ideas from the book Permutation City, and also related to the concept of Quantum Immortality, but it doesn't go as far as QI suggests since the laws chosen from may not necessarily be infinitely flexible.)
It doesn’t feel like that at all. I am who I am because I was born as a human. Something born as a worm is not me, and could not be me. I would not be me if I was a worm. That would be a worm. I...
It feels like there's some sense in which you could have been born as a worm or anything else with consciousness instead of a human, and it was just down to chance you were born as a human.
It doesn’t feel like that at all. I am who I am because I was born as a human. Something born as a worm is not me, and could not be me. I would not be me if I was a worm. That would be a worm. I would not be me if I was born in a different human body. The body we are born in defines our “me-ness”. As you yourself say, a worm would experience its own (hypothetical) consciousness in a different way to me. It would have its own sense of self, and would not be me. You would not be Macil if you were a worm. (How would you type this comment? How would you even conceive the concepts in this comment?) A worm could not be you and you could not be a worm.
This idea that we could all be born into different bodies seems to imply that there’s a cosmic “waiting room” filled with individual consciousnesses, all waiting to be born into some new body – and then we get randomly allocated to a body as bodies are made. I’m imagining some minor deity-in-training, grabbing consciousnesses from the pile, and shoving them into each corporeal body as they’re conceived. “Here, you get this worm body. You get this human body. You get this tree body. You get this lobster body.” And so on.
Like I said, we haven’t proven the existence of immaterial consciousness, separate from a body. It’s a bit of a stretch to be imagining a waiting room for these unproven immaterial consciousnesses.
Also, I’d rather not rely on “it feels like” as a way of exploring the world and the things in it.
Related to the Anthropic principle, it seems very unclear to reason about probabilities that we should find ourselves as any specific person. I feel comfortable with statements like "I could have been born as someone else somewhere else in the world" and "Given that you're born a human, the chance of being born in the US is (population of US divided by the total population)", but I have no idea how to reason about questions like "What is the chance of being born as a cat, an AI, a worm, a bacteria, or a rock instead of a human?", "What is the chance of being born in the 20th century?",
This is just more of that cosmic “waiting room”.
I could not have been born as someone else. If someone else was born, that person would not be me. Even if, during my conception, a different sperm from my father had impregnated the egg from my mother, that person would not be me. To take a simple and obvious example, if the sperm that impregnated my mother’s egg carried an X-chromosome instead of a Y-chromosome, that would have resulted in a very different person being born. There would be a Cecily_Clarke in existence, and Algernon_Asimov would not exist.
While trying to define "consciousness", I used a lot of "feels like" statements to try to pump some intuition and point at separate parts of the concept, not so much to argue for the validity of...
Also, I’d rather not rely on “it feels like” as a way of exploring the world and the things in it.
While trying to define "consciousness", I used a lot of "feels like" statements to try to pump some intuition and point at separate parts of the concept, not so much to argue for the validity of those statements. (Some of those intuitions may be invalid, especially if the reductionist position is true.) The vocabulary on the subject is over-loaded and unclear, and the subject matter exists in our heads, so it's hard to point at parts of it more directly.
I don't fully disagree with your criticisms about the "waiting room" examples. I think I over-used them in my post; I was trying to make my own lead in to the meatier examples in the page with the Doomsday Paradox vs the Presumptuous Philosophers argument, which are a lot more interesting than my examples without entirely relying on vague notions of waiting rooms.
I think this is just playing around with definitions. Like many words, "life" is a nebulous category, with viruses and prions being borderline cases, but if you can say everything is life then the word is no longer useful.
Similarly for "consciousness," which is even more nebulous. Someday there might be a technical definition that doesn't quite line up with the one we use now, but it should match up for many obvious cases or it becomes another concept entirely.
Regarding defining the term "consciousness," I think you're spot on. I've had to dabble with defining it for various papers in philosophy and other classes over the last few years, and I have never once been satisfied by what I've read in my research or written in my papers.
Every attempt at a definition seems to have one flaw or another in it that the idea's proponents hand-wave away, likely because they know how big a hole it blows in their argument. Maybe someday we'll have an all-encompassing, useful definition, but, until then, I think it's almost pointless to discuss it in technical terms unless you severely limit the meaning to be what we intuitively think of as consciousness.
Yes it is. They start from naive or overly broad definitions and arrive at incredible conclusions. But it’s interesting nevertheless, those are very smart people.
Nautilus seems to have a recurring problem with this. I rarely bother to read anymore when I see one of their articles here or on HackerNews, because I've learned to expect that their incredible titles about new physics or some other huge new idea are typically just that: not credible.
This all strikes me as metaphysical muddling of language. Either we redefine ‘consciousness’ to include the states we observe in particles such as electrons (which would seem to devalue the meaning of consciousness to the point of uselessness) or we decide to use language appropriately and describe physics in terms of physical models that physicists already have at their disposal, including spin, charge, electric force, radiation etc.
It’s impossible to refute the claim that electrons, other subatomic particles, or other non living materials are internally aware of their surroundings and have inner experiences—we can’t exactly interrogate these objects. The fact that we don’t observe such things as electrons changing states of consciousness (like we do with higher order life forms which become unconscious during sleep, or when in comas, or when they die) suggests to me that the panpsychist’s notion of consciousness isn’t physically real (an option I’m willing to accept, but only with evidence), or it’s so mundane as to not be a useful state to be of interest. That is to say, if everything is conscious, it seems rather useless to use descriptively.
If what’s actually interesting about consciousness is some observable scale of information theoretic dynamism, at one end of which we place higher degrees of consciousness such as manifested in animals, then I feel like there is still linguistic utility in limiting what we consider to be conscious to those objects that are complex enough to exhibit that higher degree. If we use language as a naive lens through which to model reality, we have an antonym of consciousness in that of unconsciousness. If it is more useful to model consciousness as a scale that is not polar (i.e., there is no pole of ‘unconscious’), I’ve yet to see the utility in doing so. It seems to me there is utility in separating things into discrete classes, such as separating the unconscious (door-knobs and bricks) from say the marginally conscious (yeast or sunflowers), from the conscious (bats and squids), from again the highly conscious (humans and great apes). I would challenge anyone who believes in panpsychism to explain where electrons or stars fit on such a scale—or if the belief is that there is no scale, explain why we seem to be able to observe clustering of phenomena associated with different life forms of varying complexity with some consistent, relative ordering.
Thank you for sharing. I like this idea a lot, especially the iterative behavior that Whitehead prescribes to particles; feels quite postmodern.
The article brings up a lot of good points about the "spectrum" that life exists on, i.e. that it is much more of a gray area than many people assume. We make the cutoff somewhere around viruses in accordance with our rules for life, but clearly the fact that these figures of liminality exist at all is an indication that a binary is not necessarily a good way of classifying them. It follows that consciousness, as an emergent quality of the processes of life, represents a similarly spectral characteristic, and further that this spectrum can be extended to include, in some sense, everything that we can observe. There cannot be two spectra; if one end is "un-consciousness" (i.e. void; absence as a physical quality, the "thing" that is absolutely, definitely the least conscious in the universe) and the other end is "arbitrary maximum consciousness," then by definition everything that has a material existence is at least somewhat more conscious than the un-conscious; if it were equally so then it would be the un-conscious.
Perhaps anecdotes are a little unscientific of me, but, well, this is ~humanities. I've always felt the dichotomy between life and un-life, between qualia and otherwise that we consider ourselves to live in an irreconcilable one. The insane level on which quantum physics appears to operate is not compatible with the classical models that assume subjectivity in ourselves (perception, etc.) and objectivity elsewhere. If our observation alone of a particle is what determines its "state," then on some level it is acting of its own accord. Further, if this process is "random," as we seem to think it is, and therefore cannot be predicted, how can it fit into our perception of inanimate matter as quantitative, unchanging, and predictable? Controllable? Evidently it controls itself, on an atomic and subatomic level, and I think that certainly merits it the title of "just barely conscious."
Individual quantum interactions have random outcomes, but the distributions of the random outcomes are constrained by physics in known ways, and many random outcomes from known distributions compounded together usually have predictable results. If you flip a coin a million times, then there's a 95% chance you're going to get heads between 499,000 and 501,000 times. A speck of dust has over a hundred quadrillion atoms, so the randomness of its quantum interactions is filed off and it's very predictable at macroscopic scales.
Not to this little black duck.
For starters, the article connects consciousness with choice, and then connects choice to action. But the ability to choose is not inherently a property of consciousness; being conscious is the only requirement for consciousness. So, even if an electron were to conscious, that would just mean it's aware of itself and its surroundings. It doesn't mean that it can change anything about its surroundings, or that it can even make a choice. An aware electron might simply be aware of its orbit in an atom, endlessly whirling around the nucleus. It might simply be aware of its orbit as "business as usual" and be content with that. Or it might be screaming at its inability to change its orbit by even one Planck length, and be trapped in an eternal hell (like the man in 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)'.
Consciousness is not choice. Choice is not action. The writer talks about "how we can turn these 'merely' philosophical considerations about the nature of mind throughout nature into a testable set of experiments", but those experiments only test for an entity's ability to change its behaviour, not for whether it's conscious.
Then there's the matter of whether an electron can have consciousness. How? What physical substrate would this consciousness reside in? Ours resides in a highly complex arrangement of matter, consisting of a hundred billion of cells, connected trillions of ways. Does the electron's consciousness arise from its complex structure? As far as we know, an electron is an elementary particle: it has no component particles. It is what it is, whole and entire. Where's the complexity?
This leads us to the likelihood that consciousness is not material. We're now in the realm of souls: an immaterial consciousness. We haven't proven that our consciousness is immaterial. Why would we assume that an electron has a soul if we don't?
I find this whole concept very difficult to swallow.
I think it may be useful to split apart the concepts of consciousness and self-awareness like this:
Some possibilities:
I think the reductionist position works well for most pragmatic matters, especially when considering things like AI and mind-uploading. If there is a magic bit, an AI without it will never know, a human that uploads themselves into a machine won't even know they lost the magic bit, and an uploaded human that is reassembled into a meat brain won't know whether they got the magic bit back, so it doesn't feel like something that can have an effect on the world.
But It feels like it's leaving something unexplained, though it's extremely hard to point at what it's leaving unexplained. Here's some open problems that I'd hope a more complete theory could address. Most of these have to do with perspective or point of view, which I think is a big part of what we mean when we say "consciousness".
It seems like a better theory of consciousness could show us the exact limits and ways that the Anthropic principle must be applied. There seem to be valid ways to use the Anthropic principle ("it's no surprise that we find ourselves on a planet capable of supporting life, because we must or else we wouldn't exist or we'd find ourselves as life somewhere else on a planet that did") and invalid ways to use the Anthropic principle ("it's no surprise that we find ourselves on a planet with a moon with the exact properties as ours, because we must or else we'd find ourselves as a different kind of life on a planet without a moon exactly like ours") that are hard to differentiate by any clear principle, and there are situations where it's totally unclear how to apply the Anthropic principle.
Related to the Anthropic principle, it seems very unclear to reason about probabilities that we should find ourselves as any specific person. I feel comfortable with statements like "I could have been born as someone else somewhere else in the world" and "Given that you're born a human, the chance of being born in the US is (population of US divided by the total population)", but I have no idea how to reason about questions like "What is the chance of being born as a cat, an AI, a worm, a bacteria, or a rock instead of a human?", "What is the chance of being born in the 20th century?", or judging between the Doomsday Paradox vs the Presumptuous Philosophers (or anything else on that page).
I think UDASSA gives a very high-level framework that might describe our reality where these problems would conceivably all have specific concrete answers, but the principle doesn't give any way to efficiently compute answers like these besides brute-forcing the execution of the distribution of all possible universes under it and seeing how these questions turn out over the distribution.
Extremely half-baked idea that hints to a model where consciousness could exist immaterially as an entanglement between our perspective and the laws of the universe: If you presume a constantly-forking universe that makes new branches/timelines for different possible outcomes (which MWI proponents argue Quantum Mechanics directly implies) where different people can have different subjective measure (probability) of the same outcomes (which I believe QM has been shown to imply), and then went a step further and imagined that the "true"/"raw" physics of reality constantly picked from a set of rules to follow one at random at each step, and only a subset of rules allowed the continuation of life, then by the Anthropic principle, we would constantly find ourselves down the small probability branches where chance has continually picked rules compatible with life. In this view, consciousness could be defined as anything with a point-of-view that from its own point-of-view, through the Anthropic principle is seemingly able to exert a pressure on the physics of the world to keep operating in a way compatible with its own existence. Presumably this could be everything, including individual electrons, but maybe by some logic it's even more true of rich feedback loops like those that make up self-awareness. (Ugh I've seen an article before discussing this exact idea, but I've lost the link. The idea is slightly related to some ideas from the book Permutation City, and also related to the concept of Quantum Immortality, but it doesn't go as far as QI suggests since the laws chosen from may not necessarily be infinitely flexible.)
It doesn’t feel like that at all. I am who I am because I was born as a human. Something born as a worm is not me, and could not be me. I would not be me if I was a worm. That would be a worm. I would not be me if I was born in a different human body. The body we are born in defines our “me-ness”. As you yourself say, a worm would experience its own (hypothetical) consciousness in a different way to me. It would have its own sense of self, and would not be me. You would not be Macil if you were a worm. (How would you type this comment? How would you even conceive the concepts in this comment?) A worm could not be you and you could not be a worm.
This idea that we could all be born into different bodies seems to imply that there’s a cosmic “waiting room” filled with individual consciousnesses, all waiting to be born into some new body – and then we get randomly allocated to a body as bodies are made. I’m imagining some minor deity-in-training, grabbing consciousnesses from the pile, and shoving them into each corporeal body as they’re conceived. “Here, you get this worm body. You get this human body. You get this tree body. You get this lobster body.” And so on.
Like I said, we haven’t proven the existence of immaterial consciousness, separate from a body. It’s a bit of a stretch to be imagining a waiting room for these unproven immaterial consciousnesses.
Also, I’d rather not rely on “it feels like” as a way of exploring the world and the things in it.
This is just more of that cosmic “waiting room”.
I could not have been born as someone else. If someone else was born, that person would not be me. Even if, during my conception, a different sperm from my father had impregnated the egg from my mother, that person would not be me. To take a simple and obvious example, if the sperm that impregnated my mother’s egg carried an X-chromosome instead of a Y-chromosome, that would have resulted in a very different person being born. There would be a Cecily_Clarke in existence, and Algernon_Asimov would not exist.
While trying to define "consciousness", I used a lot of "feels like" statements to try to pump some intuition and point at separate parts of the concept, not so much to argue for the validity of those statements. (Some of those intuitions may be invalid, especially if the reductionist position is true.) The vocabulary on the subject is over-loaded and unclear, and the subject matter exists in our heads, so it's hard to point at parts of it more directly.
I don't fully disagree with your criticisms about the "waiting room" examples. I think I over-used them in my post; I was trying to make my own lead in to the meatier examples in the page with the Doomsday Paradox vs the Presumptuous Philosophers argument, which are a lot more interesting than my examples without entirely relying on vague notions of waiting rooms.