>>14
Take this 3D cellular automaton and scan it for the quantum processes which yield consciousnessI suspect this is highly non-trivial, and even undecidable in general. There is a simpler way to cheat about this using Algorithmic Information Theory, but it's irrelevant to your problem. The best comparison (if not identity) I've seen someone make to the concept of consciousness/observer moment was to that of arithmeticsl truth, yet arithmetical truth is not expressable in arithmetic itself (Tarski's undefinability theorem). This would mean that if you wanted to extract or identify all conscious observers within some structure, such as an Universal Dovetailer, you would never know if you found them all and you would know that no algorithm exists for extracting all possible conscious observers. Yet, the conscious observers select their future states randomly from all the possible future continuations existing within the UD which are consistent with their past histories. Yet, it's very likely that any conscious process has all kinds of unusual continuations, but there is no way for anyone to guarantee any particular continuation that would exist for all conscious processes. Thus you end up with something a bit strange: future is indeterminate (space, time, "reality", "nature", which computation, ...) from the first-person view, yet globally a deterministic 'everything'(beyond QM Many Worlds; more close to the Schmidhuber Ensemble, but not respecting the Universal Prior from the 1st person point of view); most histories (1st person) are countably infinite in length(first person immortality) and the number of finite histories is countably infinite (thus of null measure compared to those finite histories), yet no universal 'Heaven'(shared 1st person plural world continuation; just like our current reality being a shared dream) thanks to Tarski (and Godel), but fragmented ones would exist.
Ignore all that I've said if you don't assume computationalism (or at least functinalism) or if you think classical first-order logic does not hold when applied to (Peano) arithmetic, or if you think the Church Turing Thesis is false or if you think this world is a nonsensical, non-rule-following magical fantasy place. I would probably do well to put in context what the hell I'm talking about (what (meta)physical theory I'm referencing here: I only mentioned the assumptions that lead to it, not the actual theory), but I'll let you think for yourself as it would be too kind for me to give a complete answer to someone who uses that terrible scatological forced meme to end a post.