On 31 Oct 2011, at 06:20, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/30/2011 5:09 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
A common response to the idea of QTI is, Why should I care if I die
and someone else in another world who thinks he is me survives? But
this objection shows a lack of understanding of consciousness works
if there are multiple instantiations.
But multiple instantiations is exactly what we do not experience.
So the existence of other people who think they are me is purely a
speculative inference. According the theory they aren't me, they
just share some past history. Bruno emphasizes that his experience
with Salvia implies that "he" exists independent of his history.
But this "he" is still not multiple. I haven't used Salvia, but I
suspect that experience still requires at least short histories.
Hmm... let me try to restate what I tried to convey. In fact I have
always thought that consciousness always relate to time or a time
quale. So I was very happy that the simplest definition of first
person, given by the Theatetus' notion of knower (Bp & p) leads both
to a logic of knowledge (S4) and of time (S4Grz = (roughly) a temporal
logic with a notion of irreversiblity). In that way the knower is a
"time builder", and it explains why consciousness/knowledge is
intrinsically related to time. It consolidate also the relation
between the first person and the intuitionist conception of the
conscious subject (Brouwer).
I mentioned the salvia experience as providing a very curious
hallucination looking like a counter-example to this.
It seems indeed possible to be conscious without any feeling of time-
duration. This is absolutely unimaginable. Even a color qualia seems
to be conceivable only through some duration. Yet, under salvia, it
happens that we can get a state of consciousness which seems to be
completely atemporal. In reports, some describe this as a form of
eternity, but this is because, I think, we have just no word for that
type of consciousness, because it does not refer to something lasting
an infinite time, nor a short time, just no time at all. It is just
not lasting at all. This makes me doubt that the knower is the
originator of consciousness, and that consciousness might be deeper
than we can think from the simple knower theory related to the
mechanist hypothesis. Unfortunately such intuition are impossible to
convey (and indeed altered state consciousness can only refute a
theory, or inspire a theory, but cannot be taken as communicable data).
Now, I am not sure that any of this is relevant for criticizing
Stathis' comment. In a quantum differentiation, like when we observe,
with a {up, down} discriminating apparatus, a particle in a state like
1/sqrt(2)(up + down), as well as in a digital mechanist
differentiation, like when we are annihilated in some place and
reconstituted in two different places, consciousness remains singular
by virtue of having the whole mechanist brain made into "two" (could
be two infinities with similar measure) brains. Without introducing
some telepathic powers, each brain can only refer to itself (or to the
person corresponding to that brain), for the same reason that if you
play chess with a machine, you can copy its state, and play two
different ends-game from that. You would find supernatural that, when
playing a second end-game, the machine could refer to the first end-
game (that would be magical). In other words, personal identity is an
illusion which is very simple to explain (by the connexity used for
memory and self-reference). Consciousness is harder to explain, and is
hardly an illusion.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
