Comment by disambiguation

I mainly read sections II and XII+, and skimmed others. My question is: does the author ever explain or justify handwaving "substrate dependence" as another abstraction in the representation stack, or is it an extension of "physical reductivism" (the author's position) as a necessary assumption to forge ahead with the theory?

This seems like the achilles heel of the argument, and IMO takes the analogy of software and simulated hardware and intelligence too far. If I understand correctly, the formalism can be described as a progression of intelligence, consciousness, and self awareness in terms of information processing.

But.. the underlying assumptions are all derived from the observational evidence of the progression of biological intelligence in nature, which is.. all dependent on the same substrate. The fly, the cat, the person - all life (as we know it) stems from the same tree and shares the same hardware, more or less. There is no other example in nature to compare to, so why would we assume substrate independence? The author's formalism selects for some qualities and discards others, with (afaict) no real justification (beyond some finger wagging as Descarte and his Pineal Gland).

Intelligence and consciousness "grew up together" in nature but abstracting that progression into a representative stack is not compelling evidence that "intelligent and self-aware" information processing systems will be conscious.

In this regard, the only cogent attempt to uncover the origin of consciousness I'm aware of is by Roger Penrose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

The gist of his thinking is that we _know_ consciousness exists in the brain, and that it's modulated under certain conditions (e.g sleep, coma, anesthesia) which implies a causal mechanism that can be isolated and tested. But until we understand more about that mechanism, it's hard to imagine my GPU will become conscious simply because it's doing the "right kind of math."

That said I haven't read the whole paper. It's all interesting stuff and a seemingly well organized compendium of prevailing ideas in the field. Not shooting it down, but I would want to hear a stronger justification for substrate independence, specifically why the author thinks their position is more compelling than Penrose's Quantum Dualism?