Re: Many worlds theory of immortality

[Stephen Paul King]

Dear John,       Thank you for an excellent statement of the obvious. ;-) All I am trying to do is to make some modicum of sense of this strange symptom that I have, the ability to perceive myself in the universe. I expect that my explanations of what consciousness could be should be applicable to ANY entity, not just humans. I am happy with the possibility of being wrong.   Stephen   ----- Original Message ----- From: John M To: Stephen Paul King ; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 5:29 PM Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality Stephen, you seem to have a clear idea about  YOUR meaning of  "consciousness". The discussion skewed pretty much into "human consciousness", which restricts a general idea of it. I wonder if your "Any model that we propose" refers to models of Ccness, or the 'bearer' of such?  I couldn't agree more with your 'model' view, no matter in which sense, - we can speak only in terms of ('our', cut, limited) models. I.e. our 1st person interpretation of whatever we 'get' from 3rd person (or mind-interpreted observation) at all. (What is this 'mind'?)   I volunteered on a 'psych-related' list in 1992 to identify that "thing" (or not 'thing') Ccness generalized from 'human' down (or up") to the inanimate (stupid word) and ideational items, as: "acknowledgement of and response to information" (where of course information was not 'the bit', rather some (mentally OR physically) recognized difference). E.g. the attraction of an anion to a positive charge. Or: a perplexing maxim by G. B. Shaw . You ARE asking for too much, the thousands of psych etc. scientists at the yearly Tucson conferences since the eary 90s could not agree in an acceptable identification of ccness, because they needed different meanings to fit their own work. Most of them thinking about human ccness only.   I like Stathis's doubts about "who is sane and who not" > > ...human minds have a correct model of reality, as opposed to the "broken" minds of the mentally ill. This is really very far from the truth. <  < because our image of mentally illness is just 'unfitting' our 'sanity'-image. ("Our" reality? as seen from this universe?)   Cheers   John Mikes