On 01 Jan 2012, at 02:07, David Nyman wrote:
On 31 December 2011 23:35, Pierz <pier...@gmail.com> wrote:
Not to wish to pre-empt Bruno's reply, but I think you're mixing up
1-
p and 3-p. From 3-p, all branches are conscious, but I only
experience
myself on one branch at a time, probabilistically according to the
measure of computations. There's no individual soul, just in one
sense
a single consciousness that experiences every possible state.
Yes, and the sense in which there is "a single consciousness that
experiences every possible state" is indeed an unusual one. It's as
if we want to say that all such first-personal experiences "occur"
indifferently or even "simultaneously", but on reflection there can be
no relation of simultaneity between distinguishable conscious events.
The first-person is, by definition, always in the singular and present
NOW.
Yes.
And Brent makes himself this more precise when he said later (to
David) that:
<<
Are you saying all the experiences are at different times so they can
the experience of one soul that's traversing the experiences in
sequence? I'd say they all exist timelessly, or more exactly time is
inferred from the relation of their contents.
>>
The difficulty consists here in placing the inference and the relation
between contents in "one" (relative) computational state. Here, the
theorem of Kleene (which handles the notion of self) cannot be used in
a completely satisfactory way, and this is part of the impossibility
to introspect the working of one's consciousness. We have to be unable
to know who we really are, except for some unnameable subject. But we
can be aware of that intrinsic ignorance. Ramana Maharshi provides a
technic based on the meditation on the koan "Who am I" to help
grasping intuitively that counter-intuitive idea.
As Schrödinger remarked:
"This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this
entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is
not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance."
I think that Schroedinger was well inspired.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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