Essentially you are saying that Q1=S1. This is certainly not true.
Clearly Q1 and S1 are related. If we could vanish a large contiguous chunk of Q1, we might see a chunk of squirrel disappear in S1; so they have some time-space context in common.
But Q1 describes a system of quarks and S1 describes a system of a squirrel and a nut. They are represented in different "languages"; to compare them you must convert them to a common "language". The relationship between Q1 and S1 is this process of language conversion -- it is the layered process of interactions and interpretations that result in S1, for some context that includes Q1.
The process that generates S1 -- in part from observations ultimately derived from Q1 -- includes the recognition of squirrels and nuts; and that part of the process occurs within the human mind.
But I could also, equally accurately, describe it as a particular configuration, C1, of cells. Or a particular configuration, A1, of atoms. Or a particular configuration, Q1, of quarks.
No. In general you are not guaranteed "equally accurate" descriptions when you convert from one language to another, from one perspective to another, from one domain abstraction to another. For example the fraction 1/9 is exact, but its decimal representation limited to three decimal places, 0.111, is only approximate.
Q1 is, in fact, a description of a squirrel eating a nut
I addressed this above. Q1 is a system of quarks that is part of the context that led to S1, it is not S1.
That I am using a human-level description to refer to it does not make it somehow an exclusively human-level as opposed to quark-level system, any more than the fact that I'm using an English-language description to refer to it makes it an English-language-level system.
For the purpose of efficient communication mixing perspectives in this way is generally fine. To answer certain questions on existence and meaning -- for example to identify if arithmetic has an existence that is independent of humans and our artifacts -- we need to be more careful.
You seem to be failing to attend here to the difference between descriptions and the systems they describe.
I'm not saying Q1=S1. That's a category error; Q1 is a description of S1. The map is not the territory.
I am saying that Q1 and "a squirrel eating a nut" are two different descriptions of the same system, and that although "a squirrel eating a nut" depends on a human mind to generate it, the system it describes (which Q1 also describes) does not depend on a human mind to generate it.
Agreed that there are gains and losses in goin...
Certain kinds of philosophy and speculative fiction, including kinds that get discussed here all the time, tend to cause a ridiculous thing to happen: I start doubting the difference between existence and non-existence. This bothers me, because it's clearly a useless dead end. Can anyone help with this?
The two concepts that tend to do it for me are
* Substrate independence/strong AI: The idea that a simulation of my mind is still me. That I could survive the process of uploading myself into a computer running Windows, a cellular automaton run by this guy, or even something that didn't look like a computer, mind, or universe at all to anyone in the outside world. That we could potentially create or discover a simulated universe that we could have ethical obligations towards. This is all pretty intuitive to me and largely accepted by the sort of people who think about these things.
* Multiverses: The idea that the world is bigger than the universe.
My typical line of thought goes something like this: suppose I run a Turing Machine that encodes a universe containing conscious beings. That universe now exists as a simulation within my own. It's just as real as mine, just more precarious because events in my reality can mess with its substrate. If I died and nobody knew how it worked, it would still be real (so I should make provisions for that scenario). Okay, but Turing Machines are simple. A Turing Machine simulating a coherent universe containing conscious beings can probably arise naturally, by chance. In that case, those beings are still real even if nobody on the outside, looking at the substrate, realizes what they're looking at. Okay, but now consider Turing Machines like John Conway's Fractran, which are encoded into an ordered set of rational numbers and run by multiplication. I think it's fair to say that rational numbers and multiplication occur naturally, everywhere. Arithmetic lives everywhere. But furthermore, arithmetic lives *nowhere*. It's not just substrate-independent; it's independent of whether or not there is a substrate. 2+2=4 no matter whether two bottlecaps are being combined with two other bottlecaps to make four bottlecaps. So every Turing-computable reality already exists to the extent that math itself does.
I think this is stupid. Embarrassingly stupid. But I can't stop thinking it.