I don't know if even lossless compression of the whole input-output map is going to preserve everything. Let's say you have ten seconds left to live. Your input-output map over these ten seconds probably doesn't contain many interesting statements about consciousness, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to compress away consciousness.

It is not your actual input-output map that matters, but your potential. What is uploaded must be information about the functional organization of you, not some abstracted mapping function. If I have 10 s left to live and I am uploaded, my upload should type this comment in response to your comment above even if it is well more than 10 s since I was uploaded.

And even on longer timescales, people don't seem to be very good at introspecting about consciousness, so all your beliefs about consciousness might be compressible into a small input-output map.

If with years of intense and expert schooling I could say more about consciousness, then that is part of my input-output map. My upload would need to have the same property.

Even if consciousness plays a large causal role, I agree with crazy88's point that consciousness might not be the smallest possible program that can fill that role.

Might not be, but probably is. Biological function seems to be very efficient, with most bio features not equalled in efficiency by human manufactured systems even now. The chances that evolution would have created consciousness if it didn't need to seem slim to me. So as an engineer trying to plan an attack on the problem, I'd expect consciousness to show up in any successful upload. If it did not, that would be a very interesting result. But of course, we need a way to measure consciousness to tell whether it is there in the upload or not.

To the best of my knowledge, no one anywhere has ever said how you go about distinguishing between a conscious being and a p-zombie.

'm not sure that consciousness is just about the input-output map. Doesn't it feel more like internal processing? I seem to have consciousness even when I'm not talking about it, and I would still have it even if my religion prohibited me from talking about it. Or if I was mute.

I mean your input-output map writ broadly. But again, since you don't even know how to distinguish a conscious me from a p-zombie me, we are not in a position yet to worry about the input-output map and compression, in my opinion.

If a simulation of me can be complete, able to attend graduate school and get 13 patents doing research afterwards, able to carry on an obsessive relationship with a married woman for a decade, able to enjoy a convertible he has owned for 8 years, able to post on lesswrong posts much like this one, then I would be shocked if it wasn't conscious. But I would never know whether it was conscious, nor for that matter will I ever know whether you are conscious, until somebody figures out how to tell the difference between a p-zombie and a conscious person.