Saibal Mitra wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[email protected]> > Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 09:23 AM > Subject: Re: A calculus of personal identity > > > 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. > >>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. 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? > > > You can take time evolution as an example. In both classical physics and > quantum mechanics, information is preserved. All the information about us > was already present in the early universe....
That is not a consensus theory. The Copenhagen and other intepretations in which the wave-function collapses provide for growing information. Even many of those who assume a strictly unitary evolution, suppose that the net information is zero or very small: the information we see is cancelled by negative information embodied in correlations with particles that inflation has pushed beyond our horizon. 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 [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
