Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Brent Meeker writes: > >>> I think it is one of the most profound things about consciousness that >>> observer moments don't >>> *need* anything to connect them other than >> >> their content. They are linked like the novels in a series, not like the >> >> carriages of a train. It is not necessary that the individual novels be >>> lined up specially on a shelf: as long as they have each been written and >>> exist somewhere in >>> the world, the series exists. >> >> > But the series exists, as a series, by virtue of the information in them. > They are like > Barbour's >> > time-capsules; each contains enough references and characters from the others > to allow them to be > >> > put into order. It's not clear to me what duration "obserever moments" have > - but I don't think > >> > they are novel length. I imagine them more like sentences (a complete > thought as my English > teacher >> > used to say), and sentences *don't* have enough information to allow them to > be reconstructed > into >> the novel they came from. > > A book is the analogy that came to mind, but there is an important difference > between this and > conscious experience. Books, sentences, words may not need to be physically > collected together to > make a coherent larger structure, but they do need to be somehow sorted in > the mind of an > observer; otherwise, we could say that a dictionary contains every book ever > written or yet to be > written. Moments of consciousness, on the other hand, by their nature contain > their own observer.
Even if they are not self-conscious? If they are not reflective, as most aren't, then what is it about the "observer" that makes it *the same observer*? You seem to be postulating a mystic dualism in which otherwise disjoint moments of consciousness are joined by having the same observer...in the Cartesian theater? > > >> > That's why I suggest that OMs are not an adequate ontological basis for a > world model. On the > other >> > hand, if we include brain processes, or more abstractly, subconscious > thoughts, then we would > have >> enough information to string them together. > > I know some people on this list have attempted world-building with OMs, but > my starting point is > the less ambitious idea that consciousness can in principle extend across > time and space without > being specially linked. I'm not sure how to take that - a poetic metaphor? Time and space are our inventions: part of our model of the world. In that model > If a person's stream of consciousness were chopped up into seconds, minutes, > days or whatever, > using whatever vehicle it takes to run a human mind, and these moments of > consciousness randomly > dispersed throughout the multiverse, they would all connect up by virtue of > their information > content. Do you disagree that it would in principle be possible? Yes, I disagree. At the level of minutes it would probably work; at the level of seconds, I'm doubtful; at the level of milliseconds, I don't believe it. Brent Meeker --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
