Jesse Mazer wrote:
You might say that in the last example the states were "causally
connected", while in the first they were not. But why should that make any
difference, especially to a solipsist?
If one believes in "psychophysical laws" (to use Chalmers' term) relating
3rd-person patterns of causality to 1st-person qualia, then perhaps
non-causally-connected descriptions of an algorithm would not increase the
measure of the corresponding 1st-person experiences (and if you believe in
a single universe as opposed to a multiverse where every causal pattern is
instantiated somewhere, then certain possible 1st-person qualia might not
be experienced at all if the corresponding causal pattern wasn't
instantiated somewhere in spacetime).
There are two types of causal relationships here: that between physical
states and mental states, and that between different physical states. I was
suggesting that the former relationship should still hold regardless of how
the physical states come about.
Incidentally, David Chalmers has written a paper discussing these very
ideas, available on the net: http://cogprints.org/226/00/199708001.html
--Stathis Papaioannou
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