On 3/29/2012 7:37 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 3/29/2012 9:20 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 29 March 2012 20:47, meekerdb<[email protected]> wrote:
You don't know that. It's an assumption based on the idea that conscious
experience is something a certain physical body, a brain, does. But if
conscious experience is a process then it is certainly possible to create a
process that is aware of being in both Washington and Moscow at the same
time. Think of a brain wired via RF links to eyeballs in M and W. Or The
Borg of Star Trek. Of course that experience would be strange and we would
tend to say, "Yes but it's still one consciousness." So then the question
becomes what do you mean by not experiencing duplication? Is it a mere
tautology based on how you define 'consciousness'?
Surely it's just a necessary prerequisite for accepting the
possibility of either MWI or comp? IOW, if one rejects, on whatever
grounds, that a unique subjective perspective could be consistent with
the objective existence of multiple copies (as I think is the case
with Kent) then one is forced also to reject both MWI and comp. Given
such a view, neither theory could be a viable explanation for one's
lived experience of observing "one universe at a time".
AFAICS, the more exotic examples you give above, e.g. a distributed
process, or a Borg-type group-mind, present no difficulties beyond
that for "ordinary" consciousness. Again, either one accepts that
duplication of these states of affairs would be compatible, mutatis
mutandis, with the corresponding "single universe" perspective
(however exotic) or not.
Given the above, what makes it difficult to make sense of John's
objections to Bruno's argument is precisely that he accepts the
possibility of multiple copies in a comp or MWI scenario, whilst
ignoring the necessity of recovering a singular perspective. But the
latter step is a prerequisite, in any scenario, for reproducing the
empirically uncertain state of affairs. Without it, the "probability"
of every outcome - as John has continually reiterated - can only ever
be 100%!
"Selection", even if only implicit, is an ineliminable feature of any
theory seeking to explain the empirical facts. Kent's proposal is a
process that eliminates all branches but one, albeit on a somewhat
different basis than Copenhagen. Similarly, the heuristic I suggested
in an earlier post entails "selection", but in a non-destructive
manner. BTW, I had long retained a dim recollection of a similar
selection metaphor involving "pigeon holes" from my youthful SF
reading, which I recently re-discovered to be Fred Hoyle's 1960's
novella "October the First is Too Late". I also found that John
Gribbin refers to this very notion in his recent Multiverse book
(apparently he was a student of Hoyle's), relating it to the ideas of
Deutsch and Barbour. This reinforced my suspicion that they do rely
implicitly on such a selection principle, though AFAICS neither of
them acknowledge it explicitly.
David
Hi David and Brent,
I have a question. Could it be that the "sense of self as being-in-the-world" (ala
Nagel's bat) is a phenomenon not at all unlike the uniqueness of a fixed point
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_%28mathematics%29> on a manifold?
Under what mapping?
It seems to me that one of the key aspects of the sense of self or "I" that it is unique
in its association with its location and its memories.
Location is just part of one's model of their body. If you had two bodies, one in Moscow
and one in Washington, you'd have two viewpoints in 3-space and you'd develop a model of
having bodies in both places.
Being in two places at the same time would at least be confusing, Try navigating with a
combination of two maps - overlay the maps of Washington and Moscow and try to figure
out where you are.
Ask someone who flies radio control planes. They become able to 'place themselves' in the
plane.
I offer the movie "12 Monkeys <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Monkeys>" as a
fictional narrative exploring what happens when one's localization is split in the time
sense. In my studies, I have considered how the various pathologies of consciousness
sketch for us some of the fundamental aspects of consciousness in a 3-p'ish way. For
example, the various dissassociative disorders ranging from phantom limb to multiple
personality disorders and schizophrenia tell us that an individual's sense of self is
strongly correlated with the synchronization of both temporal and spatial queues both
internal to the brain and of a person's location. Thus "being in two places at the same
time" is not that much different from "having two sets of sense data that are disjoint"
(in the being in Moscow and Washington) such that unless a single reconciliation of the
two is possible, there will be inevitably a splitting of the "I"'s or 1-p.
Not at all. I take the opposite lesson. Your brain invents your sense of self. The
difference between the schizophrenic hearing voices in his head and you thinking thoughts
is that you recognize the voice as being yourself. The reason people have phantom limbs
is that their body is an internal model.
BTW, this line of reasoning argues strongly against the "Borg" group-mind idea as
possibly yielding a consciousness of the same kind as the one that we have because of
the inability to define a single "point of view" given the wide and even disjoint nature
of the panorama of sense data that would be involved.
It might not be possible for humans, because they evolved to integrate the vision from two
eyes; but in principle I think a person could learn to see the point of view at two
different locations. I certainly see nothing logically contradictory or nomologically
impossible.
Consciousness is, I argue, fixed to a single point and cannot be distributed.
Distributed behavior would more correlate to what the psychologist like to call "the
unconscious". Consciousness, or at least self-aware-consciousness, emerges from the
unconscious only if and when a fixed point like function can be defined on it.
(Compactness and closure properties must exist...)
Take my favorite thought experiment. Suppose I design two Mars Rovers and I want them to
coordinate their movements in order to round up Martian sheep. I can easily distribute
the artificial intelligence between the two of them, using data links so whatever one sees
the other sees (incidentally this, minus the AI, is what combat aircraft software does
now) and so there is a single top level decision routine on top of local decision routines
about maneuvering around obstacles and managing internal states.
Brent
Speaking of SciFi writers, I recommend books by James P. Hogan, such as Paths to
Otherwhere
<http://www.amazon.com/Paths-Otherwhere-James-P-Hogan/dp/0671877674/ref=pd_sim_b_2> and
The Proteus Operation
<http://www.amazon.com/The-Proteus-Operation-James-Hogan/dp/0671877577/ref=sr_1_19?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333074338&sr=1-19>
which consider some aspects of the questions that we are asking here.
Onward!
Stephen
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