Thanks for following up! Sorry for my lack of clarity. Here is an attempt to explain how I am thinking:
Time is discrete, and therefore conscious/unconscious experience is a sequence of discrete conscious/unconscious states.
The objective duration of an experience is proportional to the number of states comprising it.
For the same reason that it does not make sense to talk about accelerating/decelerating e.g. the sequence of integer numbers, it does not make sense to talk about accelerating/decelerating experiences.
So, strictly speaking, it is not possible to have “simulated minds that have the same experiences but run through those same experiences at different objective speeds”. If 2 minds have the same experiences, their objective duration will necessarily be the same.
However, casually speaking, an experiences can be said to be accelerated (decelerated) if it was obtained by running the original n (1/n) times as fast. For example, for a mind of 1 bit where 0 and 1 represent unconsciousness and consciousness, one can have:
An original experience comprised of 4 states: o1 = 0; o2 = 1; o3 = 0; o4 = 1.
An accelerated experience comprised of 2 states, corresponding to running the original 2 times as fast: a1 = o1 + o2 = 1; a2 = o3 + o4 = 1.
A decelerated experience comprised of 8 states, corresponding to running the original 50 % as fast: d1 = o1 = 0; d2 = o1 = 0; d3 = o2 = 1; d4 = o2 = 1; d5 = o3 = 0; d6 = o3 = 0; d7 = o4 = 1; d8 = o4 = 1.
The welfare of an experience is the sum of the welfare of the states comprising it. The way I defined accelerated and decelerated experiences above, if states 0 and 1 have welfare of 0 and 1, decelerating the experience would increase welfare:
The original and accelerated experiences would each have a welfare of 2.
The decelerated experience would have a welfare of 4.
The intensity of an experience is the sum of the absolute welfare of the states comprising it. Higher computation rates are associated with greater intensity.
The felt duration of an experience is a property of the current state, but felt duration is not independent of past states. Longer felt duration is associated with greater intensity.
Thanks! I think that makes sense. I discuss something slightly similar on pp. 21 − 22 in the paper (following the page numbers at the bottom), albeit just the idea that you should count discrete pain experiences in measuring the extensive magnitude of a pain experience, without any attempt to anchor this in a deeper theory of how experience unfolds in time.
Maybe one thing I’m still a bit unsure of here is the following. We could have a view on which time is fundamentally discrete, rather than continuous. There are physical atoms of time and how long something goes on for is a matter of how many such atoms it’s made up of. But, on its face, those atoms needn’t correspond to the ‘frames’ into which experiences are divided, since that kind of division among experiences may be understood as a high-level psychological fact. Similarly, the basic time atoms needn’t correspond to discrete steps in any physical computation, except insofar as we imagine fundamental physics as computational. Thus, experiential frames could be composed of different numbers of fundamental temporal atoms, and varying the hardware clock-speed could lead to the same physical computation being spread over more or fewer time atoms. This seems to give us some sense in which experiences and physical computation unfolds in time, albeit in discrete time. However, I took it you wanted to rule that out, and so probably I’ve misunderstood something about how you’re thinking about the relationship between the fundamental time atoms and computations/experiential frames, or I’ve just got totally the wrong picture?
Thus, experiential frames could be composed of different numbers of fundamental temporal atoms, and varying the hardware clock-speed could lead to the same physical computation being spread over more or fewer time atoms. This seems to give us some sense in which experiences and physical computation unfolds in time, albeit in discrete time. However, I took it you wanted to rule that out, and so probably I’ve misunderstood something about how you’re thinking about the relationship between the fundamental time atoms and computations/experiential frames, or I’ve just got totally the wrong picture?
Interesting! I think you got my picture right, but I am assuming one experiential frame always corresponds to one temporal atom, because one’s mind, which is a physical system, will be in a certain state for each temporal atom. However, since temporal atoms are super short (the Planck time is 5.39*10^-44 s), I guess the vast majority of experiential frames is pretty empty, having welfare close to 0. I suppose it would be possible to accelerate/decelerate a given experience by orderly elimating/adding a bunch of empty experiential frames.
What you described seems analogous to what I have in mind if I interpret your experiential frames as ones with welfare meaningfully different from 0. If these are packed closer together (further apart), the experience will be accelerated (decelerated).
Thanks for following up! Sorry for my lack of clarity. Here is an attempt to explain how I am thinking:
Time is discrete, and therefore conscious/unconscious experience is a sequence of discrete conscious/unconscious states.
The objective duration of an experience is proportional to the number of states comprising it.
For the same reason that it does not make sense to talk about accelerating/decelerating e.g. the sequence of integer numbers, it does not make sense to talk about accelerating/decelerating experiences.
So, strictly speaking, it is not possible to have “simulated minds that have the same experiences but run through those same experiences at different objective speeds”. If 2 minds have the same experiences, their objective duration will necessarily be the same.
However, casually speaking, an experiences can be said to be accelerated (decelerated) if it was obtained by running the original n (1/n) times as fast. For example, for a mind of 1 bit where 0 and 1 represent unconsciousness and consciousness, one can have:
An original experience comprised of 4 states: o1 = 0; o2 = 1; o3 = 0; o4 = 1.
An accelerated experience comprised of 2 states, corresponding to running the original 2 times as fast: a1 = o1 + o2 = 1; a2 = o3 + o4 = 1.
A decelerated experience comprised of 8 states, corresponding to running the original 50 % as fast: d1 = o1 = 0; d2 = o1 = 0; d3 = o2 = 1; d4 = o2 = 1; d5 = o3 = 0; d6 = o3 = 0; d7 = o4 = 1; d8 = o4 = 1.
The welfare of an experience is the sum of the welfare of the states comprising it. The way I defined accelerated and decelerated experiences above, if states 0 and 1 have welfare of 0 and 1, decelerating the experience would increase welfare:
The original and accelerated experiences would each have a welfare of 2.
The decelerated experience would have a welfare of 4.
The intensity of an experience is the sum of the absolute welfare of the states comprising it. Higher computation rates are associated with greater intensity.
The felt duration of an experience is a property of the current state, but felt duration is not independent of past states. Longer felt duration is associated with greater intensity.
Am I making any sense?
Thanks! I think that makes sense. I discuss something slightly similar on pp. 21 − 22 in the paper (following the page numbers at the bottom), albeit just the idea that you should count discrete pain experiences in measuring the extensive magnitude of a pain experience, without any attempt to anchor this in a deeper theory of how experience unfolds in time.
Maybe one thing I’m still a bit unsure of here is the following. We could have a view on which time is fundamentally discrete, rather than continuous. There are physical atoms of time and how long something goes on for is a matter of how many such atoms it’s made up of. But, on its face, those atoms needn’t correspond to the ‘frames’ into which experiences are divided, since that kind of division among experiences may be understood as a high-level psychological fact. Similarly, the basic time atoms needn’t correspond to discrete steps in any physical computation, except insofar as we imagine fundamental physics as computational. Thus, experiential frames could be composed of different numbers of fundamental temporal atoms, and varying the hardware clock-speed could lead to the same physical computation being spread over more or fewer time atoms. This seems to give us some sense in which experiences and physical computation unfolds in time, albeit in discrete time. However, I took it you wanted to rule that out, and so probably I’ve misunderstood something about how you’re thinking about the relationship between the fundamental time atoms and computations/experiential frames, or I’ve just got totally the wrong picture?
Interesting! I think you got my picture right, but I am assuming one experiential frame always corresponds to one temporal atom, because one’s mind, which is a physical system, will be in a certain state for each temporal atom. However, since temporal atoms are super short (the Planck time is 5.39*10^-44 s), I guess the vast majority of experiential frames is pretty empty, having welfare close to 0. I suppose it would be possible to accelerate/decelerate a given experience by orderly elimating/adding a bunch of empty experiential frames.
What you described seems analogous to what I have in mind if I interpret your experiential frames as ones with welfare meaningfully different from 0. If these are packed closer together (further apart), the experience will be accelerated (decelerated).