Computational theories of consciousness, encrypted minds, dust in the void and a review of the centr

Computational theories of consciousness, encrypted minds, dust in the void and a review of the central thesis of permutation city

Let's say you take a computational view of consciousness. My mind is a program. It's running on a certain set of hardware. Right now it's wetware. That could change. It could be silicone. It could be something else.

Does the space across which the hardware is spread matter? Not really. My brain occupies ~1400cm cubed. Maybe a future silicone computer could run the same program my brain runs at the same speed/latency but be spread out over a continent. The process would be the same from the inside and the outside.

Does the time across which the computation is spread matter? It seems not. I can go to sleep and wake up. Interruptions of consciousness are not death. Maybe sleep isn't comparable. Maybe I'm not conscious but the program is still running. Okay, but let's say you had a computer run me via a whole brain emulation which is accurate down to the quark level or below. Let's say it runs in one of two modes.
- continuous: It runs each step one by one with a Planck time interval between steps. (This is basically equivalent to our universe if you buy that the smallest interval we measure is also the smallest interval the universe updates at)
- discontinuous: it runs each step twice as fast (0.5 Planck time) but then every 10 steps it pauses and does nothing for 10 more steps.

Both modes would seem equivalent to a regular human observing from the outside. Both would seem the same from the inside. It seems like the interruption alone is not enough to stop me existing. Or, maybe for those 10 planck lengths the sim is paused I don't exist only to resume existing afterwards. Maybe the void between any two frames of a sim is somewhere the mind doesn't exist. Maybe that's true for out universe too. But either way, the presence of a void where computation ceases does not prevent the mind existing again in the future once computations starts up again.

There are also other time related claims worth exploring, some of which are strange. One is that speed doesn't matter. I can speed up a simulated person to 2x speed or slow them down to 0.5x. Speed. They exist either way. Communication is just more difficult. If you reject this, you also have to hold very weird beliefs. Given time is relative in our universe, rejecting this would mean believing that as people travel faster or slower than you they become less conscious/real somehow. And that for some reason your relativistic frame of references is the specific one that matters and defines whether minds can exist.

Another claim that is weirder is that order doesn't matter. Let's say I simulate a mind. The simulation is deterministic. The simulated mind lives and eventually dies in it's own virtual universe. Having run the simulation once, I now know each state. I can run it again in order. S$_1$, S$_2$, S$_3$ etc.... I can also run it out of order. S$_3$, S$_2$, S$_1$. For the mind inside the simulation the subjective experience is no different. Add a window to the simulation showing a feed from a camera in the real world and all the mind inside sees differently is the feed seemingly showing a world going backward in time from it's perspective. It get's odder still. I can run the steps out of order. Again, no subjective difference inside the sim.

So if we've established that minds can be run with the compute happening at different physical locations (the continent supercomputer example) and at any speed or order what comes next? I think the key here is some combination of biting the bullet on the triviality problem and maybe [homomorphically encrypted consciousness](https://unstableontology.com/2025/10/22/homomorphically-encrypted-consciousness-and-its-implications/), although I'm not sure the latter is necessary. The eventual conclusion is something akin to panpsychism. There are a huge number of conscious minds flickering in and out of existence in the shadows of the information our physical universe encodes.

But it's late. More on both of these tomorrow