[mattheww]

These off-base criticisms reflect the fact that commenter did not read the whole paper and likely did not even read the introduction, which ends on page 3, where he found "serious" problems.

For example, the paper nowhere conflates consciousness and memory. Instead, the paper repeats the suggestion that a requirement of consciousness may be the ability to process a substantial amount of information. This idea is related to the idea of memory, but it's not really the same.

The paper is not about describing the biological experience of consciousness at all. This paper asks the question: "Is there some way to understand from the Hamiltonian and density matrix of our universe that it should contain consciousness?"

Tegmark then proposes some criteria that are probably necessary for consciousness to arise and then presents some metrics for the various criteria and calculates those metrics for various conditions. The paper is really describing a framework for how consciousness can be considered in the context of a physical representation. The calculations should be relatively straight-forward to follow for anyone with a decent memory of their linear algebra class.

To put it another way: If you had a Hamiltonian and density matrix that described a universe that you thought contained consciousness, what kind of things would you calculate for that Hamiltonian and density matrix to try and find out if it did or didn't? This paper suggests some ways to think about this question.

So I don't understand why this comment spends so long talking about "observing consciousness."