On 5/19/2011 4:45 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:35 AM, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
It may have started a nanosecond
ago, even though I remember starting to count up from zero and am now
at the number ten. That is, I am at the number ten but it may only be
the last part, the "n" of the ten that I have actually thought; it's
only a ten when I look back and have the false memory of counting.
Isn't that what Bruno calls "last Tuesdayims"? If OMs are continuous (or
overlap) then that would provide a sequence and at least an implicit time.
Or Last Thursdayism. Last Tuesdayism is a heresy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis
The important point for this argument is that we would have no way of knowing
if Last Tuesdayism is true, and this shows that the OM's can be sequenced
implicitly from their content.
Only if their content is sufficiently comprehesive. If OM=digital
computation state, then it will be sufficient. BUT that's my whole
objection to line this discussion. Nobody ever defines OM that way.
They want an OM to correspond to a "thought" of "an elementary experience".
If this were not so, and the subjective sequencing and normal perception of
time could only happen if the OM's were generated objectively in sequence, then
Last Tuesdayism could be falsified from the fact that we do not remember a
discontinuity.
When I have a small thought it doesn't necessarily include memories of
previous thoughts, and certainly not of my whole past life. But if
that presented a problem for sequencing of disjointedly generated OM's
it would present the same problem for a stream of consciousness
generated by a normally functioning brain. If I have a sufficiently
vague moment I may not, in fact, be aware of where, when or even who I
am. When I snap out of it, I recall the vagueness, and I recall that
it happened after I had a cup of coffee and before I stood up to go
for a walk. But the same sequencing would have happened if the coffee,
the vagueness and the walk had all been generated in a disjointed
manner, and there is nothing in the experience which can indicate to
me that this is not in fact what happened.
But there is much in other experiences that indicate it did not happen that
way. Are you saying you have no theory of the world and OMs, but only
immediate experience which could be an illusion.
How the experiences are generated is a separate question. Probably Monday was
generated before Tuesday, since some information from Monday's experiences is
contained in Tuesday's experiences.
Not necessarily. If an OM is the smallest unit of experience then it
very likely does not refer to any other experience.
However, it is not true as a matter of logical necessity that Monday was
generated before Tuesday.
Logic neccessitates only that we not affirm "X and not X". It is
worthless in answering questions about facts.
The subjective sequencing would occur no matter how Monday and Tuesday were
generated.
No, that's what I disagree with. A subjective experience need not
contain information about the past. The computational states (and there
are many) must, but you are not aware of the computational state of your
neurons.
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