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jimrandomh comments on The conscious tape - Less Wrong
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I don't think this is valid; the complexity you're discarding here may actually be essential. In particular, interacting with some sort of universe that provides inputs and responds to outputs may be a necessary condition for consciousness. Perhaps consciousness ought to be a two-place predicate. If you have a universe U1 containing a mind M, and you simulate the physics of U1 and save the final state on a tape that exists in universe U2, then conscious(M,U1) but ~conscious(M,U2). On the other hand, if U1 interacts with U2 while it's running, then conscious(M,U2).
Is the universe not something that can be represented as information? Do you mean U1 includes the specific materials used for its reality? That would be taking Searle's "conscious brains must be made of conscious-brain stuff" argument, and changing it to "conscious brains must be surrounded by consciousness-inducing universe stuff".
The universe can be represented as computation, but it appears that requires a time element. You can not define a turing machine based on just a tape - it intrinsically requires a time dynamic in the form of the moving head.
So in digital physics and computationalism, time is fundemental - it really exists and can not be abstracted away. At the most core the universe is something that changes. Described as a turing machine it consists of information (the tape) and time - the mover.
That sound right - but that leads to Option 2.
Yes your option 2 sounds almost right, but see my amendments/disagreements.
A TM has an infinite working tape, but the problem of human-like consciousness has only finite input and output sizes. Therefore, you could define an (infinite) function by simply listing all possible pairs of (finite) inputs and outputs. This is a completely static, time-less representation that is still powerful enough to compute anything with bounded inputs and outputs.
Of course you can collapse any function into a static precomputation, but that is still itself a function, and it still requires at least one step, and it still requires the turing machine head, so you have not removed time.
I'm aware of no time-less representation of a turing machine, it seems impossible in principle.
Furthermore, for the system to exist in the real world, it will have to produce outputs for particular inputs at particular times - the time requirement is also imposed by the fact of time in our universe.
What you say is true. I find myself unsure how it applies to the original subject. Possibly my comment wasn't on topic... So feel free to ignore it.