First published: January 7, 2023
Last revised: January 21, 2025

One point of view shared by many (e.g. Joscha Bach) is that consciousness is software. We don't experience anything that isn't virtual, therefore since we experience our consciousness it must be virtual too. Whatever processes that run on our brain could also take place on a different substrate and therefore it should also be possible to instantiate a consciousness in a computer simulation. In particular if we were to simulate a brain exactly, the simulation would be indeed conscious.

This makes little sense to me, because it feels like it confuses the mechanism of consciousness with the experience of consciousness. There is a thought experiement that I like: suppose you are to carry out the computations of a simulation of the brain by hand. Sure, it would take an absurdly long time, but this is irrelevant: in principle, as a consequence of our scribbling on paper, a consciousness somehow, somewhere would feel. Like in Greg Egan's Permutation City, we could even break down the computation in space and time and scatter it around the universe and it would still work. This implies an explosion of consciousness everywhere, if any physical process can be plucked and considered part of one computation (or even multiple ones). One could argue that causality in this example is left out, but is it? Or is it just a more complicated chain of events?