On 13 Nov 2011, at 18:17, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2011/11/13 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
On 12 Nov 2011, at 23:11, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2011/11/12 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
On 10 Nov 2011, at 14:51, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2011/11/10 benjayk <benjamin.jaku...@googlemail.com>
Spudboy100 wrote:
>
>
> In a message dated 11/9/2011 7:27:48 AM Eastern Standard Time,
> benjamin.jaku...@googlemail.com writes:
>
> Probably the one that is most convincing is direct experience.
Try
> meditation (my favorite is just doing nothing while being aware
not to
> snooze or think or search for something to do,etc...), or, if
you are a
> bit
> more daring and very cautious and well informed, psychdelic
drugs (eg
> Salvia, Mushrooms, LSD, DMT) or suspend your belief that you
are just a
> person for long enough (then the reality of unity tends to
reveal itself
> spotaneously). If you are in the right mindset and maybe a bit
lucky you
> can
> experience states in which it is directly evident that there is
> fundamentally no other, just this consciousness that you are.
>
>
> I see, Benjamin. But unless one takes these visions as a
solipsism, I
> would
> ask, what does this bring to the table? We humans are primates,
and for
> most of us primates, we are group animals. We need each other
even though
> we
> irritate each other.
What I am describing can be said to be a kind of solipsism; only I
exist,
but I being the consciousness that we all share,
I can't make a meaning of that... we do not share a
"consciousness", not in any definition of that term.
Let me try, assuming mechanism. Would you agree that in the case
you are cut and pasted in two different places, the resulting
individuals share a common memory-past?
They share a common past memories, but as soon as they are
"duplicated", they do not share their consciousness, only past
memories.
"pure consciousness" is what is invariant through the change of
memories.
I'm not sure it is meaningful. I call that 1st person experience.
Consciousness has a subject.
Well, I guess you mean that consciousness has a content (a subject/
person has consciousness, usually). But experience with amnesia, or
with brain perturbation, like the famous experience by Penfield who
planted electrodes in brain's patient illustrate the fact that the
subjects, despite extravaguant first person experience, including
diverse amnesia, feel as remaining "one person and the same person"
throughout.
That consciousness is a first person experience that we can share,
despite we cannot communicate it. It is hard to convey because we
are used to believe that consciousness has always a content.
Exercises like staying lucid during sleep, or using some
dissociative drugs, can help to give a sense to such a consciousness
without any explicit experience and identity.
From this we can make sense of "sharing a consciousness", and may
be understand that personal identity is relative. Would the
original, before the duplication, die in case one of the copy will
die?
I can understand that sharing consciousness can be felt as a
meaningless notion, in case consciousness is defined by the first
person experiences including memories,
That's how I would define it, consciousness is the first person
experience.
but thought experiments can be imagined to defend the idea that we
might survive amnesia (as it is commonly believed),
It's the same thing as death and playing with word. Using that
definition it is obvious then that death does not exists... and at
the same time it is meaningless.
I didn't say "total amnesia".
Then I'm ok, you can survive losing memories, but you cannot survive
forgetting everything.
I agree, forgetting everything is equiavlent with a cul-de-sac, but
from the UDA conclusion, you know that, assuming mechanism, your first
person experience is indeterminate on an infinite of (arithmetical)
incarnation of those experiences, at each possible instant, so that
you can never get a point where you can forget everything. Bp -> Dt
for all personal hypostases: NO cul-de-sac.
The hard question which concern us, and a clarification of Benjamin's
assertion, is in the evaluation of the probabilities to backtrack
compared to finding yourself in an abnormal histories. From what we
can infer empirically, with a high neuro-type subst level, the
probability of backtracking (through amnesia) seems higher than the
probability of shifting in different kind of realities. 'course the
math are very hard here for getting the LUM's answer on that question.
It is easier to "interview a plant", which can switch of the root of
consciousness from memories, for a short time period.
It is obvious that we can survive amnesia, if only because this
happens everyday. We do forget many things all the time, if only
most night dream experiences. Some people can forget complete hours
or larger time period in a car crash, and we don't say that they are
dead.
Now imagine someone, Arthur, say, who is cut in B, and paste in W.
Imagine also that a backup of Arthur's teleported state has been
done in B. Imagine that Arthur dies in an accident at W, some month
after that teleportation. Other persons, in B, decide to re-
instantiate that person from the old backup in B. Would you say that
Arthur died?
That arthur + 1 month died. All of its month of experiences is
lost... A younger version of that arthur is still alive.
OK, but admitting that you are Arthur, would you say that you will die
in case we foretell you what will happen?
If the "no cul de sac" is ok for a continuation with total amnesia,
then it is not even false, but as I said devoid of content,
meaningless.
I agree. But from the first person point of view there can never be a
total amnesia. A near total amnesia is possible, and will be lived as
a remembering we were naturally close to a sort of cosmic abstract
consciousness since the start. When this is lived as a quite sudden
experience, it can be felt like an awakening, where the 'current life'
seems to be like an evanescent dream, or like a movie interrupted for
some reason. We remain fully conscious in such experience.
Strictly speaking this is equivalent with Arthur becoming amnesic of
the month-life experience in W.
Yes and it is lost.
Not necessarily. The "original" Arthur might find the diary of the
annihilated Arthur and continues "his" life.
You are not your memories. You play a role in a perspective where
those memories seems vital, but "near death" perspective can shift,
and you can decide that your value are more important than token
particular memories.
Personally I would not say that he died, just that he lost some
memories. If not, then we die everyday.
We are not aware of everything and don't remember everything, death
is the lost of personhood.
Exactly. But all the LUMs, despite being ideally correct, have already
a complex personhood, and that survives for purely arithmetical reasons.
If when you talk about "immortality" and you allow that through
total amnesia... then it's just word playing not "immortality".
I think we might agree, but if you see that "total amnesia" is really
a non sense, and if you agree we can survive with partial amnesia,
then you might ascribe more meaning to what Benjamin tried to convey.
(To be sure I do disagree with Benjamin and Rex that consciousness is
primitive. It is a mistake (in the mechanist theory) which mirrors the
Aristotelian mistake of taking matter as primitive: with mechanism we
can explain where and how the coupling consciousness/realities emerge
from.
Bruno
Quentin
Bruno
in which case the 'consciousness" we share might be the
consciousness of the least common part to ... all Löbian machines,
or even all universal machines?
We never really know who we are, it seems to me, and that ignorance
makes me open to the idea that "sharing consciousness" might make
some sense.
Bruno
not "I" in the sense of me
as a person (which is usually meant when we are talking about
solipsism).
We need others as an other to our personhood, but not as an other
to us as
consciousness (which is what we really are, the person being more
like
something we dress ourselves with). Otherness is the one seeing
itself from
different perspectives.
Spudboy100 wrote:
>
> At the end of the day, can one bring information, that
> would not, logically, be known, otherwise? For instance, that
Uncle,
> Bruno, left a mathematical puzzle, he worked on, inscribed on
page 1273,
> in the
> 1999 edition of ARS MATHEMATICA, in his old, study--something
like this,
> let us say?
You mean in a paranormal way? There are many experiental results
that
suggest so (even though its validity is disputed, but the
criticism if often
not vindicated, in my opinion), and a lot of astounding anecdotes.
But it
might not work in the way we expect, in terms of consistency,
controllability and scope.
benjayk
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