Thank you for one (of several) intelligent responses.
a necessary derivation of that universal physics is a vast quantity of space and time which we can not directly observe
This isn't quite right. The only thing that makes the derivation "necessary" is your adjective "universal." We could just as easily say that there is a supergalactic physics that explains all we can observe, and that same physics could plausibly explain what is happening in the space and time that we cannot or have not observed. Note that the unobservable realms are not merely those outside our past light cone, but also those within the limits of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, beneath the smallest structures that we can repeatedly observe, and, for all practical purposes, the space beyond the nearest nebula and/or the objects too dull for our Earth-bound telescopes to detect. It would be remarkably bad science to voluntarily choose to sample only one kilobyte from one address out of thousands of terabytes of data and assume that the kilobyte is representative. The fact that all known scientific resources are clustered in the same tiny portion of spacetime forces us to use such a sample, but it cannot and should not force us to assume that the sample is representative.
whose existence is in some fact dependent on the universal physics itself.
I don't understand what you mean. Intelligent minds with an ability to manipulate matter or energy can 'create' patterns in that matter/energy by rearranging it according to the laws of physics. However, I cannot think of any sense in which physics itself could be said to create its own patterns. Physics is the pattern in which all known matter is currently arranged, but physics does not create the matter -- it merely arranges it. Physics does not explain why there is something instead of nothing; it would be perfectly consistent with the laws of physics for there to be no electrons orbiting no protons over a volume of no space-time. How then can "everything that exists" be dependent on physics?
given any sequence of finite observations O, there is an infinite set of algorithms A that perfectly predict/compute the sequence O.
Right, but who says our observations are finite? What if important phenomenon, like, e.g., consciousness (cough) turn out to depend on infinitely small particles? What if the fate of the universe in a cosmological sense turns out to depend on what happens over infinitely long periods of time? There is no rule that I know of that says that the Universe is not allowed to clog its equations with infinities.
Physics is concerned largely with finding the minimally complex algorithm that fully predicts O.
A noble goal, but who says that sufficient simplicity to allow for computability is possible? Suppose our universe contains some true randomness beyond its initial seeding? Suppose that limits on our ability to gather information (particles that put effective distance between themselves and our present location at faster than the speed of light due to cosmic inflation; ineradicable error rates in technologically perfect computers) mean that while the universe is computable in principle, we cannot perfectly compute even a portion of our universe from the inside?
I don't mean to suggest that it's implausible that everything is governed by a universal physics. That's a respectable hypothesis. I just get frustrated when people assert, without evidence that's apparent to me, that physics will surely explain everything that we might wish to know. This is a remarkably bold claim for a discipline that predicts that most of what exists is "dark energy" but cannot say what dark energy is. Physicalism should be classed as a statement of faith, I think, and not as a justification for specific predictions about the hard problem of consciousness.
a necessary derivation of that universal physics is a vast quantity of space and time which we can not directly observe
This isn't quite right. The only thing that makes the derivation "necessary" is your adjective "universal." We could just as easily say that there is a supergalactic physics that explains all we can observe,
Physics is generally held to be universal, instead of just 'supergalactic'. For one, there is the multiverse. But in general, the idea is, as I discuss later, to find the most parsimonious explanation for eve...
This post comprises one question and no answers. You have been warned.
I was reading "How minds can be computational systems", by William Rapaport, and something caught my attention. He wrote,
Rapaport was talking about cognition, not consciousness. The contention between these hypothesis is, however, only interesting if you are talking about consciousness; if you're talking about "cognition", it's just a choice between two different ways to define cognition.
When it comes to consciousness, I consider myself a computationalist. But I hadn't realized before that my explanation of consciousness as computational "works" by jumping back and forth between those two incompatible positions. Each one provides part of what I need; but each, on its own, seems impossible to me; and they are probably mutually exclusive.
Option 1: Consciousness is computed
If consciousness is computed, then there are no necessary dynamics. All that matters is getting the right output. It doesn't matter what algorithm you use to get that output, or what physical machinery you use to compute it. In the real world, it matters how fast you compute it; but surely you can provide a simulated world at the right speed for your slow or fast algorithm. In humans today, the output is not produced all at once - but from a computationalist perspective, that isn't important. I know "emergence" is wonderful, but it's still Turing-computable. Whatever a "correct" sequence of inputs and outputs is, even if they overlap in time, you can summarize the inputs over time in a single static representation, and the outputs in a static representation.
So what is conscious, in this view? Well, the algorithm doesn't matter - remember, we're not asking for O(consciousness); we're saying that consciousness is computed, and therefore is the output of a computation. The machine doing the computing is one step further removed than the algorithm, so it's certainly not eligible as the seat of consciousness; it can be replaced by an infinite number of computationally-equivalent different substrates.
Whatever it is that's conscious, you can compute it and represent it in a static form. The simplest interpretation is that the output itself is conscious. So this leads to the conclusion that, if a Turing machine computes consciousness and summarizes its output in a static representation on a tape, the tape is conscious. Or the information on the tape, or - whatever it is that's conscious, it is a static thing, not a living, dynamic thing. If computation is an output, process doesn't matter. Time doesn't enter into it.
The only way out of this is to claim that an output that, when coming out of a dynamic real-time system, is conscious, becomes unconscious when it's converted into a static representation, even if the two representations contain exactly the same information. (X and Y have the same information if an observer can translate X into Y, and Y into X. The requirement for an observer may be problematic here.) This strikes me as not being computationalist at all. Computationalism means considering two computational outputs equivalent if they contain the same information, whether they're computed with neurons and represented as membrane potentials, or computed with Tinkertoys and represented by rotations of a set of wheels. Is the syntactic transformation from a dynamic to a static representation a greater qualitative change than the transformation from tinkertoys to neurons? I don't think so.
Option 2: Consciousness is computation
If consciousness is computation, then we have the satisfying feeling that how we do those computations matters. But then we're not computationalists anymore!
A computational analysis will never say that one algorithm for producing a series of outputs produces an extra computational effect (consciousness) that another method does not. If it's not output, or internal representational state, it doesn't count. There are no other "by-products of computation". If you use a context-sensitive grammar to match a regular expression, it doesn't make the answer more special than if you used a regular grammar.
Don't protest that a human talks and walks and thereby produces side-effects during the computation. That is not a computational analysis. A computational analysis will give the same result if you translate whatever the algorithm and machine running it is, onto tape in a Turing machine. Anything that gives a different result is not a computational analysis. If these side-effects don't show up on the tape, it's because you forgot to represent them.
An analysis of the actual computation process, as opposed to its output, could be a thermodynamic analysis, which would care about things like how many bits the algorithm erased internally. I find it hard to believe that consciousness is a particular pattern of entropy production or waste heat. Or it could be a complexity or runtime analysis, that cared about how long it took. A complexity analysis has a categorical output; there's no such thing as a function being "a little bit recursively enumerable", as I believe there is with consciousness. So I'd be surprised if "conscious" is a property of an algorithm in the same way that "recursively enumerable" is. A runtime analysis can give more quantitative answers, but I'm pretty sure you can't become conscious by increasing your runtime. (Otherwise, Windows Vista would be conscious.)
Option 3: Consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules
Just kidding. Option 3 is left as an exercise for the reader, because I'm stuck. I think a promising angle to pursue would be the necessity of an external observer to interpret the "conscious tape". Perhaps a conscious computational device is one that observes itself and provides its own semantics. I don't understand how any process can do that; but a static representation clearly can't.
ADDED
Many people are replying by saying, "Obviously, option 2 is correct," then listing arguments for, without addressing the problems with option 2. That's cheating.