[mannykannot]

"But then having any conscious experience, even one of pure darkness, must be extraordinarily informative, since we could have had countless other experiences instead (think of all the frames of every possible movie)."

It is worth asking why this argument does not also apply events like the die-rolling case, and it is because the state of the world immediately after the event is strongly constrained by its state immediately before.

The argument quoted above tacitly assumes there are no such prior constraints in the case of consciousness, but this does not seem to be supportable. If it were so, it would seem that our minds would be constantly taking a random walk through a vast number of possibilities, and it seems inconceivable that there could be consciousness in that case.

As '(52)' in the longer passage is a reference to an early paper by Tononi on his Integrated Information Theory (IIT), I think it is worth pointing out that this argument does not support IIT specifically, or more strongly than any other theory consistent with the premise that the current state of one's mind strongly constrains what happens next.