On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
>> It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments >> can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious >> moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at >> different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps >> simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience >> provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal >> intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. >> >> > That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) > > Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no "state of the brain". > Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on > opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least of them. It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0. But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en.
