> If consciousness is only a series of states in your brain, does it matter what the order of running that sequence is?
I liked Permutation City, but I regard it as something of a cognitive hazard because it's not obvious which parts are realistic and which parts aren't unless you have a fairly specialized background. The above is something that wouldn't actually work, for the simple reason that the later states depend on the earlier ones, so you can't calculate them without first calculating the earlier states.
Yes, this bothered me as well when reading Permutation City. But for the sake of argument, say we posit infinite computation (let's not worry about how that's possible), then would that objection still apply? Then it seems not all that necessary that the states are in order, but just that they exist at some point, regardless of mechanism.
I liked Permutation City, but I regard it as something of a cognitive hazard because it's not obvious which parts are realistic and which parts aren't unless you have a fairly specialized background. The above is something that wouldn't actually work, for the simple reason that the later states depend on the earlier ones, so you can't calculate them without first calculating the earlier states.