Consciousness is an activity; it happens in time. It's like running. Is the simulated robot running? Yes. If you pause the simulation, is the robot still running? No, it's frozen in the middle of running, it is not running while paused.
This makes me think that consciousness cannot be a property of minds or programs. "Active" and "inactive" aren't really properties that a program can have. A program execution is just a sequence of states; there's no well-defined interval of time in which the program is "running".
So this makes me think consciousness isn't a property of minds, but rather of how minds relate to the passage of external time. Is there any particular harm in drawing a definition of "consciousness" that excludes disembodied uploads and AIs?
consciousness isn't a property of minds, but rather of how minds relate to the passage of external time.
I don't think I understand what you're saying here.
I would certainly agree that consciousness occurs over time, and that therefore to say that a system "is conscious" at a particular instant is true enough for normal conversation, but is technically speaking problematic, just like to say that the system "is falling" or "is burning" at a particular instant is technically speaking problematic.
...Is there any particular har
In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.
Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).
I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.