Quale Zoo*

 This is going to be incomplete and freeform as shit.

What makes the self?
    Continuity? No. Reasons:
        Interpolations
            Interpolation between two people
            Interpolation of multiple people into one
            Interpolation of one person into multiple
        Perception of continuity is a part of a singular experience. Actual continuity is impossible to experience, because you only ever experience one singular experience at a time.
    Memory? No. Reasons:
        Singular experience with fake memories can be trivially imagined.
    Physical system-related structures? No. Reasons:
        - The big argument
            Definitely not the physical system itself.
                - Theseus's ship demonstrates that it can't be the matter itself
                - Physical movement across space can be considered isomorphic to copy-and-delete. More trivially, so can sleep, anesthesia, temporary suppression of short-term memory, loss of consciousness.
            Pattern of movement of information across the physical system?
                - Is definitely isomorphic to the experienced singular experiences. Empirically, it seems like you cannot experience something without it having a corresponding physical process within the physical structure that captures all of the details. Proof:
                    For any experience A, the following can be done:                     
                        0. Record the act of experiencing experience A and the following 5 minutes into some sort of a scanner that records the state of all matter in a room. Start recording.
                        1. Experience the experience A
                        2. Pay attention to it
                        3. Write down its description on paper
                        4. Stop recording
                        5. Within the recording, trace back the cause-and-effect chain of the appearance of ink on the paper to the process in the brain.
                    Thus, there's always a process in the brain.
                - Doesn't in any way prove that the pattern of movement of information across physical system gives way to actual qualia, but it's the next best thing we have. We already assume this when we consider other people as having actual consciousness instead of being philosophical zombies, so not expanding the same courtesy to other physical systems that demonstrate pattern of information movement isomorphic to a conscious process is irrational.
                    - See the big but
The big but: what process of information movement is happening within a given physical system depends on the method of observation.
    - Let singular experiences A1...A100 form a short perfect computer simulation of a conscious process, encoded into strings S1...S100.
    Change of state from S1 to S2, from S2 to S3, ..., from S99 to S100 perfectly captures all details of the pattern of information movement from A1 to A100.
    - Let's create a device D. Device D is used to read compressed information. It works the following way. When it first observes the symbol "X", it decompresses it into string S1. When it observes the symbol "X" for the second time, it decompresses it into string S2. So on until S100. Thus, when observing with device D, pattern of information movement of physical system in which a machine just writes "X" on paper 100 times perfectly captures all details of the pattern of information from A1 to A100.
    - Notably, we do not consider that the observation mechanism matters when we observe conscious states in physical systems of bodies of other human beings, or even in computer simulations. For those, we make the assumption that having the device on hand doesn't matter, just the possibility of its existence is enough.
    - But such device can theoretically exist for any pairs of strings and symbols. Thus, any sequence of symbols can be thought to be giving rise to all possible singular experiences.
    - This leads to pan-psychism. All possible conscious states are being experienced everywhere all the time.
    - But then, why does our conscious process seem structured and consistent? We seem to be living in the same world at all times, and we continue our lives normally.
        - Anthropic principle? You only get to observe the sequences of conscious states where everything is structured and consistent.
        - Not believable due to impracticality? For each "ordinary as we perceive it" states of consciousness, there are infinitely more possible continuations where in the next moment the consciousness is observing something radically different from the "ordinary world" than continuations where everything goes on as ordinary, but in the process of decision-making, leaning on the assumption that the next state of consciousness won't jump to something out of ordinary seems useful.
            - Usefulness might be an illusion. For certain states of consciousness, your current ordinary one seems like a distraction that precludes making good choices in the environments they're observing.
            - But the fact of the matter is that the observations and the assumptions of your current singular conscious experience are always all you have to go by.
        Alternative: does the universe somehow "connect" experiences that can be viewed as structurally linked in a more dense way, so that the probability of a sequence of experiences being one of those is "weighted" to be more likely?
            Doesn't seem possible? Experience as a whole just cannot be a part of some sort of a physical/logical process of how the universe works. Hard problem of consciousness. Universe can't have mechanisms to weight some experiences over others because experiences aren't "in its domain". It *will* weight some experiences over others if we limit ourselves to hypothetical observation devices that look at the direct states of matter in the universe instead of other methods of ascribing strings to symbols, but that's no less arbitrary. Across all interpretations of all symbols, the universe can't do weighting.
    Symbols can be thought to be existing in a purely ideal manner, not just in physical reality. (In the first place, the perception of physical reality requires an experience, which requires a sequence of symbols). In this sense, the nature of reality is just a static set of all possible experiences.

The true nature of reality underlying all experience is a static set of all possible experiences.

 

 * Moo