Neuron count intuitively seems to be a better proxy for the variety/complexity/richness of positive experience. Then you can have an argument about how you wouldn't want to just increase intensity of pleasure, that just a relative number. That what matters is that pleasure is interesting. And so you would assign lesser weights to less rich experience. You can also generalize this argument to negative experiences - maybe you don't want to consider pain to be ten times worse just because someone multiplied some number by 10.

But I would think that the broader spectrum of potential sources for pleasure and pain would still not require a greater spectrum of intensity.

Isn't pain in both wings worse than in one?

Russelian panpsychism doesn't postulate a new force - physics already accepts casual role of existence: only existing neurons can fire.

And it explains epistemic link - it's cogito ergo sum - you're always right, when you think that universe exists.

And rock's perception belongs to a rock.

Would anyone describe it as theirs? That access is reflective. It’s pretty difficult to retrieve data in a format you didn’t store it in.

But what if there is no access or self-description or retrieval? You just appear fully formed, stare at a wall for a couple of years and then disappear. Are you saying that describing your experience makes them retroactively conscious?

Even if I’m not thinking about myself consciously [ i.e., my self is not reflecting on itself ], I have some very basic perception of the wall as being perceived by me, a perceiver—some perception of the wall as existing in reference to me.

Is it you inspecting your experience or you making an inference from the "consciousness is self-awareness" theory? Because it doesn't feel reflective to me? I think I just have a perception of a wall without anything being about me. It seems to be implementable by just forward pass streamed into short-term memory or something. If you just separated such a process and put it on repeat, just endlessly staring at a wall, I don't see a reason why would anyone would describe it as reflective.

I mean, it is reflective in a sense that inner neurons observe outer neurons so in a sense it is a brain observing brain. But even rocks have connected inner layers.

The thing I don't understand about claimed connection between self-model and phenomenal consciousness is that I don't see much evidence for the necessity of self-model for conscious perception's implementation - when I just stare at a white wall without internal dialog or other thoughts, what part of my experience is not implementable without self-model?

"Death is fine if AI doesn't have self-preservation goal" or "suffering is bad" are also just human ethical assumptions.

You are talking about experience of certainty. I'm asking why do you trust it?

I know it's beyond doubt because I am currently experiencing something at this exact moment.

That's a description of a system, where your experience directly hijacks your feeling of certainty. You wouldn't say that "I know it's beyond doubt there is a blue sky, because blue light hits my eyes at this exact moment" is a valid justification for absolute certainty. Even if you feel certain about some part of reality, you can contemplate being wrong, right? Why don't say "I'm feeling certain, but I understand the possibility of being wrong" the same way you can say about there being blue sky? The possibility is physically possible (I described it). It's not even phenomenologically unimaginable - it would feel like misremembering.

Why insist on describing your experience as "knowledge"? It's not like you have perfect evidence for a fact "experience is knowledge", you just have a feeling of certainty.

And if seeing-neurons of someone's brain are in the state of seeing red, but they are thinking and saying that they see blue, would you say they are right?

How do you know it's beyond doubt? Why is your experience of blue sky is not guaranteed to be right about the sky, but your experience of certainty of experience is always magically right?

What specifically is beyond doubt, if seeing-neurons of your brain are in the state of seeing red, but you are thinking and saying that you see blue?

If a doctor asks a patient whether he is in pain, and the patient says yes, the doctor may question whether the patient is honest. But he doesn’t entertain the hypothesis that the patient is honest but mistaken.

Nothing in this situation uses certain self-knowledge of moment of experience. Patient can't communicate it - communication takes time, so it can be spoofed. More importantly, if patient's knowledge of pain is wrong in the same sense it can be wrong later (that patient says and thinks that they are not in pain, but they actually are and so have perfectly certain knowledge of being in pain, for example), the doctor should treat it the same way as patient misremembering the pain. Because the doctor cares about the state of patient's brain, not their perfectly certain knowledge. Because calling "being in a state" "knowledge" is epiphenomenal.

Another way to illustrate this, is that you can't describe your pain with perfect precision, you can't perfectly tell apart levels of pain. So if you can't be sure which pain you are feeling, why insist you are sure you are feeling pain instead of pressure? What exactly you are sure about?

And, obviously, the actual reason doctors don't worry about it in practice, is that it's unlikely, not because it's impossible.

though since it is about an external fact, it is itself not sufficient for knowledge.

What does "external" mean? Can I answer the doctor everything about chemical composition of air if I decide air is a part of me? Can I be wrong about temperature of my brain? About me believing that a supermarket is around the corner?

I think it’s the opposite: there is no reason to hypothesize that you need a second, additional mental state in order to know that you are in the first mental state.

One reason is that is how every other knowledge works - one thing gains knowledge about other by interacting with it. Another reason - perfectly certain self-knowledge works differently. And we already have contradiction-free way to describe it - "being in a state". Really, the only reason for calling it perfectly certain knowledge is unjustified intuition.

Another reason is that it's not really just a hypothesis, when you in fact have parts other than some specific qualia. And these other parts implement knowledge in the way that allows it to be wrong the same way memories can be wrong. So you'll have potentially wrong knowledge about qualia anyway - defining additional epiphenomenal perfectly certain self-knowledge wouldn't remove it.

You've seen 15648917, but later you think it was 15643917. You're wrong, because actually the state of your neurons was of (what you are usually describe as) seeing 15648917. If in the moment of seeing 15648917 (in the moment, when your seeing-neurons are in the state of seeing 15648917) you are thinking that you see 15643917 (meaning your thinking-neurons are in the state of thinking that you see 15643917 ), then you are wrong in same way you may be wrong later. It works the same way the knowledge about everything works.

You can define "being in the state of seeing 15648917" as "knowing you are seeing 15648917", but there is no reason to do it, you will get unnecessary complications, you can't use this knowledge, it doesn't work like knowledge - because it's not knowing about state, it's being in a state.