Some stuff on a computational theory of consciousness

Kamal

05 Dec 2025 — 1 min read

I'm behind on my writing challenge posts, so I'll turn what was growing into a long WhatsApp message into a short post.

The subject of the post is this. I don't know how long it'll stay up on PasteBin, so I'll briefly describe the argument and then give my response, which will be in the second person since it was initially written in a group chat that includes the author.

The essay

It's titled "Computational theories of consciousness, encrypted minds, dust in the void and a review of the central thesis of permutation city". It makes a series of claims about human minds based on a computational view of consciousness. Those claims include: that they're not substrate dependent, so they could run on silicone as well as on brain; that this substrate could be as big as a continent without affecting experience; that the 'processing' in that mind could run much more slowly or much faster than it does for actual human minds, again without the person whose mind it is noticing; that that 'processing' can stop and then resume without being noticed; and that a mind can be recorded in a perfect simulation and then played backwards or out of order without the person whose mind it is noticing.

My response

Don't you think our bodies matter at all for any of this stuff?

Why do you only talk about the outside world in terms of an inert observer (with one throwaway comment about communication)? Don't you think that our relations with other things help constitute us in important (maybe essential) ways that would make things like space and time matter in ways you seem to think they don't?

And re playing the sequence backwards or out of order: again, relations with things outside ourselves matter. A lot. But even setting that aside, relations _inside_ a thing definitely matter, so I'm not even sure what it means to run something like that backwards or out of order. It feels like you're confusing playing a recording of a play backwards with running an actual play backwards. The latter can't be done without breaking things like laws of physics, so it's not really running the play backwards. Maybe something similar would happen with running the simulated mind backwards or out of order such that it ceases being a mind in any meaningful sense.

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