CF Debate

Slicing Problem

IdentitySubstrateEpiphenomenalismTargets digital CF

Overview

Systems of pipes and flows can be used to construct Turing Machine equivalent architectures, so that any target CF algorithm can be implemented on a water computer. A physical gate can be built as a switch-triggered slicing mechanism to causally separate water flows throughout that architecture, such that a physically trivial act of moving a physical gate (trivial relative to the overall volume of information/matter in the system) can be used to multiply the number of conscious entities in that system.

Responses

  1. Reject the intuition that the physical gate (switch) is in fact trivial.

  2. Accept that one can multiply the number of conscious entities by triggering the switch, either because (a) the extra spatial dimension in the computer offers redundancy that we can reasonably harness or (b) because no laws of physics get violated by multiplying consciousness in such a way.

    BUT: Regarding (a), spatial dimensions are not part of the ontological picture of CF, so the on/off systems must be equivalent under CF (i.e. there's no redundancy to exploit).

    Regarding (b), one must explain how e.g. energy would be conserved in a system with twice the amount of consciousness (when the switch is triggered).

  3. Reject the claim that slicing would create additional conscious entities, arguing that because the entities share identical computations they are the same entity (individuate consciousness by type of computation, not by physical instantiation of that computation).

    BUT: This is an unusual type of CF that needs motivating separately. It implies, for instance, that two identical computations, conducted on different computers separated by thousands of light years and potentially participating in entirely different external physical causal interactions, are in fact a single entity having a single experience.

Further reading

Do you find this argument strong or weak?