I'm not sure I understand your question. Disclaimer: not an expert. Trying to unravel a thought.
I tried to make the analogy simpler. For thought experiment assume the brain is essentially a pocket calculator. Its lcd screen output is conscious state. It's a state, anyways. Just because you can alter the state you get after "1+2=" (pressing buttons, throwing acid onto the circuit board, etc) doesn't invalidate the number 3. We can agree on the concept of 3 and point to instances of 3. We can output 3 in different instances of calculators, even the human brain (in this experiment, at least, but I've heard even ants can count). The kicker for me is with a big enough lcd screen like one of those fancy graphing calculators you can output not just 3, but a picture of any such ideal, including a picture of the idea of a pocket calculator! Self reference. So what's up with that 3 and always running out of batteries?
Hard to say anything else at this point. Curious about what people may suggest. I'm sure it's not new.
Very good analogy, though I'm completely lost what is what, but it's probably because it's too early here :D
Can we all agree on the concept of 3 though? :) I mean PhD dissertations are written and successfully defended each day pro-and-contra 3.
Do we have a shared concept? Is 3 the same for a research mathematician and a 5 year old?
In practice if it works it works. The same with colors, or music, or ... well, any sort of thing and associated qualia. After all when you say 1/3 + 2/3 most people will say 1 (hopefully, though I have no idea how well known fractions are), but those pesky programmers might just laugh and say that you can't even represent them accurately.
This shows that integers (and the natural numbers) and basic arithmetical are so old in our culture that they truly are probably shared with 99.9% of humans (or let's say English speakers). But if we step a little bit outside of that by taking 4 and 8, then you might like them because they are nice powers of 2, but some Chinese people might not like 4 because it's association with death (but do like 8 because it's association with wealth & success).
And so the question is: the mind that wakes up is the same as the one that went unconscious? Is there even an abstract concept of our minds? (How tied minds are to their physical representation?) Solipsism states that despite everything indicating that there are things independently (materially or not) outside of our mind it doesn't matter because our mind is truly the only thing we have, we are, we'll ever have. (It can be a complete simulation, it can be just a dream, we can never know!)
Joscha Bach's "computationalism" (maybe he doesn't call it that) says that consciousness is evolution's answer to "how to regulate the organism in relation to other self-regulating organisms", so it's a self-directed attention of intelligence (which is also a model of things that we pay attention to). In this regard consciousness is just as part of the population as the genome, so while there are definitely you and me, but at the same time it's the same "evolutionary software" just running on a big shared pool of brains. (Which also means that we could compare every concept via computation - eg. enumerating its properties (and so on the properties required for those properties of course, so infinite regress creeps in), and this means that we can have a shared concept of 3, if it's computationally equivalent.)
I agree with the practicality of thinking of 3 as one ideal that can be emulated by the 5 year old or the PhD. Yes you could argue they're not really the same 3. Just like you'd be hard tasked with finding two identical oranges to the atom scale. But that doesn't feel like it gets me anywhere. I just don't have a straight refutation for it.
Similarly, solipsism feels like trying to reason with the kid that shouts "LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU~" at the start of each sentence.
I'll have to think more about evolutionary pocket calculators and computational equivalence. There's definitely some sneaky stuff at play
https://youtu.be/92WHN-pAFCs
"Soap bubbles are computational so everything is computational."
Wait, what?
So get a wood panel, put a few pegs on it, submerge it in soapy water and then slowly raise it from the water.
The soap film that forms between the pegs wants to minimize its surface area (to maximize its energy) so it forms a Steiner tree beteween the pegs, but .. not always!
Yes, exactly, yet it's unfalsifiable. Which makes it unscientific, but doesn't make it incorrect. It's just a maximally useless (trivial) model of the world.
