The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
From EY's post:
Suppose I build a (conscious) brain in hardware using today's technology. It uses a very low current density, to avoid electromigration.
Suppose I build two of them, and we agree that both of them experience consciousness.
Then I learn a technique for treating the wafers to minimize electromigration. I create a new copy of the brain, the same as the first copy, only using twice the current, and hence being implemented by a flow of twice as many electrons.
As far as the circuits and the electrons travelling them are concerned, running it is very much like running the original 2 brains physically right next to each other in space.
So, does the new high-current brain have twice as much conscious experience?
I'm not as versed in this trilemma as I'd like to be, so I'm not sure whether that final question is rhetorical or not, though I suspect that it is. So mostly for my own benefit:
While there's no denying that subjective experience is 'a thing', I see no reason to make that abstraction obey rules like multiplication. The aeroplane exists at a number of levels of abstraction above the atoms it's composed of, but we still find it a useful abstraction. The 'subjective experiencer' is many, many levels higher again, which is why we find it so difficult to talk a... (read more)