Thank you for writing this, It has been very informative and thought provoking to read.
This requires identifying the actual and hypothetical internal variables of a human, and thus solving the "symbol grounding problem" for humans; ways of doing that are proposed.
It seems to me that in order to do what this research agenda suggests, one would need to not only solve the "symbol grounding problem" for humans, but also solve it for the FSI in question; that is, we must know how to integrate partial preferences into in a way that allows them...
According to the view presented here, we cannot rule out that there are other parts of the nervous system that may maintain minimal separate foci of consciousness; each of these foci would have its own DSS, and they would not include each other in their DSSs (otherwise they would share a single global awareness). Since the ability to dictate speech is normally conserved for the main DSS, the contents of an additional DSS won't be relevant for speech unless the main DSS is affected by the side DSS and decides to speak becuase of this dependence. It is possi... (read more)