Le 03-déc.-05, à 11:12, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
Bruno Marchal writes:
Le 01-déc.-05, à 07:17, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
Why does an OM need to contain so much information to link it to
other OMs making up a person? [the complete message is below].
I am not sure I understand. Are you saying, like Saibal Mitra, that
OMs (Observer-Moments) are not related? How, in this case, would you
interpret your own talk about "next observer moment" (those which
could be dead end)?
Is there not a confusion between the idea of physicalist (causal)
view of the relation between OMs (which, as Brent meeker said should
be explained from a more primitive (mathematical, immaterial, not
causal, ...) notion of OM, with those very (more primitive) OMs.
Are you assuming some notion of multiverse richer than (or just
different from) a notion of multi-OMs?
In our ordinary experience, the OMs making up an individual's stream
of consciousness are causally related by virtue of the fact that that
they occur inside the same brain. If we consider thought experiments
involving teleportation or mind uploading, again the sequential OMs
are causally related due to transfer of the relevant brain pattern (or
whatever) information. However, this information tranfer is not
actually *necessary* for the OMs to be experienced as moments in the
same stream of consciousness. Say an observer experiencing OM a1
enters a teleporter which then causes another observer experiencing OM
a2 to be created at the receiving station. Then a1 and a2 are
sequential OMs, constituting a stream of consciousness a1a2 sampled
from the life of an individual. If this is so, then if a1 occurs
anywhere in the multiverse, and a2 occurs anywhere else, the same
stream of consciousness a1a2 should be experienced - even if a1 and a2
occur completely at random, with no "causal link" between them.
No causal link. OK. But there is an arithmetical or
computer-science-theoretical link. This includes memories, consistency
conditions, etc.
I am agnostic regarding the question of whether OMs are primitive or
derivative. The world could be as it appears: the physical universe
(whatever that means) gives rise to certain special physical processes
which result in moments of conscious experience, and those moments
which are related through being the product of circumscribed subsets
of physical processes constitute a stream of consciousness in an
individual life. On the other hand, in a world where exactly the same
OMs as postulated in the previous sentence exist, but all mixed up and
not connected to any (or any particular) physical process, exactly the
same individual streams of consciousness would result.
OK. So why ever postulate a physical world, given that the OMs you
describe already exist independently of us (in arithmetical platonia),
and that nobody has ever succeed in explaining what a primitive
physical world could be, and that nobody has ever succeed in relating
OMs as lived by people and some putative concrete substantial reality?
I think that with OCCAM, any notion of computationalist OMs, makes the
idea of a ontologically primitive physical multiverse useless. (and the
Olympia/movie-graph makes it senseless, but here I would say that
remark is off-topic).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
