If I were working for the SCP foundation, I'd be putting some D-class personnel on the problem of figuring out where exactly the line between ideograms/pictures and "textual or verbal form" lies. Can you describe it in Chinese writing? A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus? Is the determinant whether any sound sequences used for human communication are being encoded? What about only using the purely pictographic Chinese characters, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols?
(What about a picture of the waveform of a verbal description? ...a complete scifi brain scan of someone who understands what it is?)
Information given in the SCP tell us that digitally stored files are affected to. That seems to mean digitally stored text.
Text in a digital form is just a way to indirectly reference pictures to be shown on the screen or printed. Sometimes it's a straight lookup table correspondence (ASCII), sometimes more complex (Unicode); there may be noise (OOXML). I'd guess that, in context of this SCP, a PNG with letters on it would count as text too.
This suggests that the issue isn't with a representation format, but the interpretation of it - or at least in a way the representation is processed by human minds.
I put forward a hypothesis that the relevant recognition criteria is words being recognized from sensory inputs by the human brain, and backtracking to most direct source of these words. This would explain the results of both documented tests. I propose following further tests to be made:
- Repeating Test 1, but blindfolding the test subject before telling them to write words down, so that they can't see them. Expected outcome: like in Test 2.
- Repeating Test 2, but instructing the test subject to not repeat the words heard out loud. Expected outcome: like in Test 2.
- Repeating Test 2 with the test subject incapable of hearing. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
- Repeating Test 2, using a machine recording sounds and replaying them after a delay, in place of the test subject. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
- Repeating Test 1, using a computer connected to a microphone and a printer, in place of test subject; the machine would run a dictation algorithm to print the spoken words. Expected outcome: nothing happens.
I don't think either test involved the speaker conveying information about the SCP to the subject. The information was pinned to the wall in pictogram form.
In test 1, the subject was commanded to translate the pictograms into text.
In test 2 the subject was commanded to describe the pictograms verbally.
"We can ask: if consciousness is reducible to computation, then what kinds of computation suffice to bring about consciousness? What if each person on earth simulated one neuron in your brain, communicating by passing little slips of paper around? Does it matter if they do it really fast?
Or what if we built a gigantic lookup table that hard-coded your responses in every possible interaction of at most, say, 5 minutes? Would that bring about your consciousness? Does it matter that such a lookup table couldn’t fit in the observable universe? Would it matter if anyone actually consulted the table, or could it just sit there, silently effecting your consciousness? For what matter, what difference does it make if the lookup table physically exists—why isn’t its abstract mathematical existence enough?"
For that matter, does it make a difference if neurons are acoustically coupled or electrically coupled? Why do we think of brains as stopping at the skull?
It all boils down to where you draw the border of "self". It's relatively easy to draw a gaussian shell around your brain, but do you also draw it around your physical body?
Do you draw your shell around your children?
What about your group identity such as your neighborhood, town, sports team, or country.
Can you draw this shell around abstract ideas that you consider core to your being?
Where you draw that shell might change your level of empathy for other people.
Humans always looking for bright lines of demarcation.
Consciousness is not a well defined concept. Any line you draw between conscious and non-conscious is arbitrary. So where do you want to draw the line?
Greg Egan's Permutation City is a story that takes a pretty interesting approach (and, trying to not give away too much, extreme perspective) to this question. I would stop short of glowingly recommending it because I found the storytelling itself to be only okay, but the core idea and take on this matter itself was one of the most memorable concepts I've seen in hard scifi.
Permutation City is the most fresh and insightful view on consciousness I have ever read. Every page is mindblow after mindblow of ideas you thought you knew but have never seen them taken to those consequences. I look at computer science as a beautiful philosophical minefield of interesting takes on language, existence and consciousness, and Greg Egan is a huge part of that. I never found someone who writes like him.
IMO, Greg Egan is one of the greatest geniuses I've ever come across, and I strongly recommend his novels and stories ... but I think it's worth noting that he's said that he doesn't believe that the theory of consciousness that Permutation City is based on can be true.
This table already exists somewhere in Pi. In fact, somewhere in there is an encoding of the entire universe as it exists at the moment you read this. It also contains this moment, and every other moment you ever have or will experience.
If the flow of time was compared to a new deck of playing cards, would it matter if they were shuffled? Given any individual card, the previous and next cards can be determined.
Heck, every event in the universe is there in Pi, in order too.
Ok, just read the linked article, and there was one part about putting a person in a superposition and what that might be like.
I have a weird theory connected to the "one electron universe" that at the moment right before the big bang there was 1 particle. Because of relativity it's position and velocity must have been exactly 0, but this violates uncertainty, so the particle instantly becomes infinitely uncertain.
Everything that happens in the universe is just part of the process of the waveform of that event collapsing.
(What about a picture of the waveform of a verbal description? ...a complete scifi brain scan of someone who understands what it is?)