Wading In

slatestarscratchpad:

The way I interpreted Tegmark and Egan is that your consciousness is purely mathematical and only corresponds to physical processes by coincidence. Calculating pi won’t “create” you, because all it does is turn the computer doing the calculation into one more physical process corresponding to the Platonic mathematical process that is your consciousness. But the number of physical processes that correspond to you doesn’t matter.

I’m just taking a riff on them.  I’m not a platonist, I think I’m “tied to my brain” in some real sense, not a platonic form.  

I want to suggest that the idea that a computer that does nothing but crunch-pi-until-the-universe-ends contains conscious multitudes seems pretty absurd.  It seems like you need context to the calculations to get consciousness, but that has implications for brain emulations.  

Again, don’t know the answer, it’s just something that gives me pause.