Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on Preachers who are not believers:
There are systemic features of contemporary Christianity that create an almost invisible class of non-believing clergy, ensnared in their ministries by a web of obligations, constraints, comforts, and community. ... The authors anticipate that the discussion generated on the Web (at On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post website on religion, link) and on other websites will facilitate a larger study that will enable the insights of this pilot study to be clarified, modified, and expanded.
Daniel Dennett's "refutation" of the Cartesian theater has been widely criticized. Basically, he relies on perceptual illusions such as discrete motion being perceived as continuous, arguing that there should be a fact of the matter as to whether "the motion in the Cartesian theater" is continuous or not. But phenomenology is far simpler (or more complicated) than that: the fact that we perceive the quale of continuous_motion does not imply that a homunculous somewhere is seeing the object in an intermediate position at each given moment in time. It is a strawman argument.
At this point how is this claim any different than claiming that these are classical systems and that qualia and consciousness are what those algorithms feel like?
Quantum systems have much nicer properties from this point of view. An internally entangled quantum state can be an ontologically basic entity while still possessing a rich internal structure, in a way that has no direct equivalents in classical physics.
evolution would only do this if it had an easy way of keeping things in coherence that didn't take up too much resources
Models of quantum computation are quite variable in how resistant they are to decoherence. Topological quantum computing is much more resistant to errors than models based on ordinary quantum particles.
If there's a substantive evolutionary advantage to any form of computational speedup to processes which we needed to do in the wild.
Why wouldn't there be? Intelligent processing clearly confers some evolutionary advantage, and there have been many proposals for artificial general intelligence (AGI) using quantum computation.
Quantum mechanical systems can be simulated on a classical computer given a source of randomness.
This implies that unconscious classical systems can simulate a conscious being. But such a simulation of consciousness would not involve the systems in our physical world which can actually be "felt from the inside". In this theory, qualia and consciousness are not caused by quantum mechanics; they are what some extremely complex quantum states feel like.
The only caveat, is that if certain compsci conjectures are true then it actually takes more time or more memory
If quantum algorithms are at all useful, this is enough for evolution to favor quantum computation over classical.
What makes this avenue different from investigation of neuron configurations?
Not much. It's still neuroscience, but it takes reports of subjective experience a bit more seriously, and tries to explain them by using existing physics, rather than treating them as meaningless or as magical and unexplainable.
I fear talking about thing that aren't connected to observable facts. I fear that I might say a lot of grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning.
Look, it's not that complicated. I'm not the only person who talks about the Cartesian theater and claims that we can somehow feel brain algorithms from the inside. If subjective experience is not an observable fact to you, then your psychology is radically different from that of many other people.
Light is simple, but evolved organisms care very little about the fundamental qualities of light. They care a lot about running efficient computations using various inputs, including the excitation of photosensitive neurons. This is probably why the Cartesian theather feels very much like computation on high-level inputs and outputs, rather than objectively fundamental things such as wavelengths of light. And the computations which transform low-level data like excitation of sensory neurons into high-level inputs are probably unconscious because they are qualitatively different from conscious computation.
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What "treatment" did you have in mind? At best, Roko made a honest mistake, and the deletion of a single post of his was necessary to avoid more severe consequences (such as FAI never being built). Roko's MindWipe was within his rights, but he can't help having this very public action judged by others.
What many people will infer from this is that he cares more about arguing for his position (about CEV and other issues) than honestly providing info, and now that he has "failed" to do that he's just picking up his toys and going home.