If the signals are still there to ensure causal influence, I think I would still be conscious like normal. The argument is exactly the same: whenever something is inactive and not affecting other things, it doesn’t need to be there at all.
We could also go a level down and have your brain consist only in atoms that briefly pop into existence in time to interact with the next atoms.
This is getting close to the problem I’m grappling with, once we step away from neurons and look at individual particles (or atoms). First, I could imagine individual atoms acting like neurons to implement a human-like neural network in a counterfactually robust way, too, and that would very likely be conscious. The atoms could literally pass photons or electrons to one another. Or maybe the signals would be their (changes in the) exertion of elementary forces (or gravity?). If during a particular sequence of events, whenever something happened to be inactive, it happened to disappear, then this shouldn’t make a difference.
But if you start from something that was never counterfactually robust in the first place, which I think is your intention, and its events just happen to match a conscious sequence of activity in a human brain, then it seems like it probably wouldn’t be conscious (although this is less unintuitive to me than is accepting counterfactual robustness mattering in a system that is usually counterfactually robust). Rejecting counterfactual robustness (together with my other views, and assuming things are arranged and mapped correctly) seems to imply that this should be conscious, and the consequences seem crazy if this turns out to be morally relevant.
It seems like counterfactual robustness might matter for consciousness in systems that aren’t normally conscious but very likely doesn’t matter in systems that are normally conscious, which doesn’t make much sense to me.
If the signals are still there to ensure causal influence, I think I would still be conscious like normal. The argument is exactly the same: whenever something is inactive and not affecting other things, it doesn’t need to be there at all.
This is getting close to the problem I’m grappling with, once we step away from neurons and look at individual particles (or atoms). First, I could imagine individual atoms acting like neurons to implement a human-like neural network in a counterfactually robust way, too, and that would very likely be conscious. The atoms could literally pass photons or electrons to one another. Or maybe the signals would be their (changes in the) exertion of elementary forces (or gravity?). If during a particular sequence of events, whenever something happened to be inactive, it happened to disappear, then this shouldn’t make a difference.
But if you start from something that was never counterfactually robust in the first place, which I think is your intention, and its events just happen to match a conscious sequence of activity in a human brain, then it seems like it probably wouldn’t be conscious (although this is less unintuitive to me than is accepting counterfactual robustness mattering in a system that is usually counterfactually robust). Rejecting counterfactual robustness (together with my other views, and assuming things are arranged and mapped correctly) seems to imply that this should be conscious, and the consequences seem crazy if this turns out to be morally relevant.
It seems like counterfactual robustness might matter for consciousness in systems that aren’t normally conscious but very likely doesn’t matter in systems that are normally conscious, which doesn’t make much sense to me.