Stathis wrote, Friday, June 30, 2006 12:24 AM > 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.
Okay, suppose that there are no observers, and the Earth has been burnt to a cinder except for one copy of Milton's "Paradise Lost", and one copy of the Oxford English dictionary. It seems to me that we should say that just two books still exist. Do you agree? (Sorry for asking what you have said many times one way or the other; I'm not clear as to who has said what.) Supposing that you do agree that these two book in our spacetime still exist, then as you have said, all the words in "Paradise Lost" can be found in the Oxford dictionary. Next we begin the slippery slope argument where Paradise Lost is broken apart into its separate pages and scattered throughout the cosmos. I agree with you that in one sense Milton's book no longer exists, but it still does exist in the sense that there is enough redundancy to piece it back together again were a new sentient life form to come into being, and to find those pages, and to bind them. What I disagree with is your statement that the mind of the observer really played any key role. True, in most realistic situations it helped for the new sentient race to have minds and to exercise them in the conscious collection of these far flung pages; but accidental solar winds from millions of stars per chance could have done exactly the same thing. So the book would come back into existence again, totally without observers being present anywhere in the universe. > 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? Lee P.S. Apologies to all: I have not been able to keep up with list volume, and so am sorry if I am repeating (or failing to address) subsequent arguments made by others. It seems a risk worth taking; experience seems to indicate that we usually make different points. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---