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VNKKET comments on Nonperson Predicates - Less Wrong
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This problem sounds awfully similar to the halting problem to me. If we can't tell whether a Turing machine will eventually terminate without actually running it, how could we ever tell if a Turing machine will experience consciousness without running it?
Has anyone attempted to prove the statement "Consciousness of a Turing machine is undecideable"? The proof (if it's true) might look a lot like the proof that the halting problem is undecideable. Sadly, I don't quite understand how that proof works either, so I can't use it as a basis for the consciousness problem. It just seems that figuring out if a Turing machine is conscious, or will ever achieve consciousness before halting, is much harder than figuring out if it halts.
Your conjecture seems to follow from Rice's theorem, assuming the personhood of a running computation is a property of the partial function its algorithm computes. Also, I think you can prove your conjecture by taking a certain proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable and replacing 'halts' with 'is conscious'. I can track this down if you're still interested.
But this doesn't mess up Eliezer's plans at all: you can have "nonhalting predicates" that output "doesn't halt" or "I don't know", analogous to the nonperson predicates proposed here.