Prompts for Can Two Minds Share One Experience

Initial question and scope

Do you think there’s material in this 6-part conversation worthy of a reaction essay for our blog? notes/private/MRW-coarse-grainings.txt Partial summaries have been posted on my friend’s blog https://michalryszardwojcik.substack.com/ with the full contents (as in the file and separately across the volumes) on his website.

I don’t want to rehearse discussions reminiscent of primary versus derived intentionality – We extensively covered MRW’s worry about whether computation exists self-sufficiently or whether it’s imposed by interpretation. We explicitly said that phenomenal unity requires more than operational unity, it requires causal integration. Understanding can be ascribed metaphorically, but I think non-metaphorical ascription can only apply understanding to minds, and we have specific conditions for mindedness. An interesting reaction angle for me would be characterizing boundaries of phenomenal experience, e.g. whether there can be multiple loci of experience with overlapping qualia.

We could use examples to triangulate thinking more concretely:

• conjoined twins
• split-brain patients
• current (hypothetically), and extrapolated AI systems

I say hypothetically because we tentatively argued current AI systems are some-degree minded (sufficient degree for literal understanding) but (again tentatively) not phenomenally conscius.

Overlap and regulatory organization

You already noticed that unlike IIT, we allow for overlap; but the overlap is metastable because of causal pull from the distinct regulatory centers. (Which themselves aren’t reified homunculi, but Dennett-style “centers of epistemic gravity”).

Since my shift from Platonism to identity theory, I think that the anser is one experiental occurrence in the (presumably rare and transient) situations of regulatory agreement. Once the balance shifts, the experiental occurrence on one side would shift to a vehicle of more abstract representation (more imagery-like filler for the corresponding scene graph node).

Does the “center of gravity” metaphor extend to orbital dynamics of e.g. a planet in a binary system?

Ah, the second (jointly-sustained) situation is not one I imagined, surprising; but could apply hypothetically to say brain halves…

A field is just an abstraction, the regulatory processes are where the hemisphere=star vs. brain=star caches out. See “Redness is an experience” essay for the identity take; experiences are not properties of a field, rather the filed is a graph of experiences. WDYT?

True, the qualification is important. We don’t dispose with a subject = field, but its ontology is not phenomenological.

Yes. An idealistic ontology would search for subject demarcation at the level of the graph: e.g. the maximal connected component, or more likely (for pure idealism) the maximal clique (where the maximal connected component is a universe). We’re not forced to respect this way of delineating.

(I think Bernando Kastrup would bite the bullet about the triangle, just a guess.)

“His model is closer to your connected-component proposal than to a maximal-clique criterion.” That’s not possible, because the edges must also account for the “user interfaces” between the dissociated individuals.

Our model is a more realistic account of mind melding than Kastrup’s :-D

What I meant is that for Kastrup, there’s no Star Trek canon mind melding, because the two subjects would disappear and then reappear… Never mind.

Phenomenal unity and acquaintance

There is an intuition behind the notion of unified phenomenal field. That intuition is that the unification comes from having a connected scene graph (thus a clique under transitive closure, e.g. via “experienced beside of”). Is such a relation there (represented), and is it phenomenally manifest?

I have the intuition that I experience thoughts as located in my head – but only when I reflect on it. I think it’s wrong (e.g. need not be there when I don’t reflect on it). The regulatory relation (as it’s teleologically epistemic) tends to ride along representational edges, and in a broad sense it’s representational (we even called it acquaintance), but maybe doesn’t have to and maybe acquaintance was already a bit metaphorical?

The regulation is epistemic in the sense of addressing content (bearing to vehicles), so not arbitrary physiological regulation. We used “acquaintance” to get a handle on the hard problem. It’s articulated in one of (some of?) the essays.

Identity theory and the earlier metaphysics

Is there more that’s worthwhile bringing up in the essay, like some things about identity theory we could pull from primary sources, like Place and Smart?

Identity theory and Platonism (in the sense of “anti-identity” / functionalism) have a funny disagreement. Identity says one experience can be shared between subjects (as in our account in a metastable / unstable way, but despite the constitutive nature of the acquaintance relation). Platonism says an experience cannot be shared between subjects, but subjects can be shared between worlds in a metastable / unstable way.

Under Platonism, vehicle-identical experiences will be numerically distinct in two subjects; are they also phenomenally distinct, or is that moot on Platonism (no fact of the matter)?

What makes identity theory work is that some conceivable possibilities are not metaphysically possible (I claim). Two arbitrary regulatory processes cannot overlap a vehicle because of incompatible causal claims on the vehicle. There could be a conceivable assignment of vehicle to content where the vehicle participates with a different content in a different process; but that assignment is gerrymandered by the conceiver.

I was a Platonist (because algorithmic functionalist) not that long ago, switched over the course of writing the blog this year. One MRW reaction essay stated that forcefully (a section “Against Platonism”).

The very old writeup is at notes/metaphysics-old.md Maybe we can pinpoint the evolution better with my side of a discussion, here: notes/Nov-2025-metaphysics.prompts.md (that’s prompts only, no writeup to that discussion).

I did think that… in the lineage of Gary Drescher’s Good and Real, Eliezer Yudkowsky “how an algorithm feels like from the inside”. Does platonic emanation support multiple realizability?

You get a more daring expression of Eliezer’s metaphysics in “The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover”

How did the schism between identity theorists and functionalists originate?

Interestingly, we argue against Block on the blog.

The dialogue and the ontology ladder

Is my friend MRW’s conversation with Thomas Epistemes notes/private/MRW-Jul_27-esse-for-consciousness.txt part of the 6 volume discussion or separate?

The synopsis for the essay conversation doesn’t read like anything novel, we’ve been back and forth with MRW on his position. But it’s probably a good condensation of MRW’s views. Which of my essays is already coming close to responding/reacting to it?

Does the latest dialog still use the language of being legible to physics? What do they conclude on whether Michal’s view is present in the literature?

We had a stalemate on this. My position was that digital computation is legible when its content is in the causal nexus.

I have an ontology ladder where a logic engine can have as-if understanding and high efficacy while not being minded, and a minded system with literal understanding can lack phenomenal experience.

What would you suggest as an outline for our new essay? (No word counts yet, just ideas/goals.)

What would the old-school identity theorists make of the recent popularity of panpsychism?

Nitpick: “two possibilities: distinct regulatory organizations making compatible demands on a shared vehicle, and a phenomenal occurrence jointly sustained by both organizations.” These two aspects are one possibility, versus presumably another possibility.

Yes, that’s a good point that I could have overlooked, “whether that larger unity displaces or coexists with the smaller ones”. Is it clear that my position opposes panpsychism, and does Michal’s position lean into panpsychism?

Is what Michał calls “physics supplies” the same as what Chalmers calls “psychophysical laws”?

Physics and grounding

I tried to undermine Michal’s position by pointing out that physics is merely another explanatory science of patterns at some level of description, rather than the science of grounding itself. He conceded that it’s a worry for his position, but he hasn’t changed his position. I think that Chalmers’ psychophysical laws is a misnomer for a similar reason. On one hand, it reframes first by stating the form of the law. On the other hand, it picks the particular term “physical”.

To clarify: the metaphysics of Wolfram’s Physics shows that the physics of gravity and quantum mechanics is descriptive of emergent patterns rather than a science of grounding itself.

I would distinguish the success of Wolfram’s project as physics (explaining a yet unexplained phenomenon) from its success as metaphysics (where it’s on a slightly firmer ground). But we already have a long essay on the Wolfram project, which we shouldn’t retread in this essay.

You can freely quote from notes/Nov-2025-metaphysics.prompts.md as they haven’t contributed to the blog, so it wouldn’t be redundant.

We could describe it as a move closer to Michał’s position. From “a subject is an inhabitant of the multiverse” (individuated at the constitutive abstractions), to worldliness that’s explanatorily shielded from the multiverse at the level of physics (via Wolfram’s account of quantum mechanics).

That’s good, thanks. Can you write the essay, and then we iterate, or do you have any questions?

Revisions to the first draft

“The move also produces an interesting reversal.” – I think it’s not clear enough why this is a reversal. The reason is that with the Platonic account an experience cannot be shared by two phenomenal spaces because of how it’s constitutively relational to the subject.

Do you think that “metastable” rather than “unstable” is the right word? I used “metastable” because regulation is temporally thick, a “pass through” intersection would not establish a shared phenomenal now.

Agreed, go for it. Except maybe “Regulation is temporally thick: compatible involvement must persist long enough to constitute a shared phenomenal now.” can be confusing as it connects two things that aren’t intrinsically explanatory in either direction, only assuming our framework gives the implication: “and that [on our account] explains the thickness of the phenomenal now”.

I would also change: “B’s experience may continue while A represents what it no longer shares.” to “B’s experience may continue while A’s experience changes without necessarily upsetting its functionality.”

My point was not so much to introduce the no-upsetting condition, which was just for illustration. My point was that your original phrasing sounded like a piece of experience would disappear while a representation is sustained. My point was that, among different options, my intuition says it’s more likely that the qualitative character of the representation would change for one of the subjects.

We could mention in the second half of “Metastability and larger subjects” That our account is less metaphysically burdensome than either Platonism or IIT because, with shared experiences, there is not a problem of experiences flickering in and out of existence, or a drastically sudden shift of qualitative experience (not driven by the relevant dynamics)

At the end of “Conjoined twins and divided brains”, would it be worthwhile to repeat that the framework makes the alternatives less mysterious, because even if ordinary were in fact, surprisingly, circling between two subjects and one unified subject, experiences would “stay as they are” because of sharing?

In the last section: “Yet asking physics to supply actuality leaves the crucial work ahead: specifying the event and the conditions under which it is one experience.” is unclear: what does “supply actuality” mean, and why wouldn’t actuality entail individuation?

What work does this sentence do? “This does not require an actual occurrence to await some further act of individuation.”

Alright, it’s ready! I’d be glad if you do a final editorial pass, then commit. Thanks!