On 30 March 2012 19:54, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: >> The problem with all this (as Kent makes explicit) is that there is >> nothing in the mathematics of the "game physics" that corresponds to >> this kind of momentary selection of subjective localisation. >> Unfortunately, his own proposal doesn't really solve the underlying >> problem, because although it can account, given the experimental >> situation, for my seeing spin-up and not spin-down (because the other >> doesn't objectively exist any longer) it cannot account for why the >> experience is of David making this observation rather than Brent > > It does if you think experience is an epiphenomena of physics. Brent and > David are different physical systems and only one is looking at the system.
Sure, but even if one believes that to be the case, it is still taken entirely for granted that there is some natural principle for the selection of THIS physical system from the class of all such systems. To appeal, a posteriori, to the fact that one's observational perspective is apparently associated with this particular system and not any other is merely to argue in a circle; since that is what we are trying to explain we cannot adduce it as the explanation. As I said before, the requirement for some principle of selection, in this sense, is rarely made explicit, but nonetheless implicitly relied on. More often than not our particular localisation in space and time has been consigned to the realm of "psychology" or "illusion", as in Einstein's reputed remark, as though it were somehow possible to disarm this inconvenient observational fact with scare quotes. So what intrigued me about Hoyle's idea (and according to Gribbin it was rather more than a fictional conceit for him) was precisely that his making it explicit exposed an "elephant in the room" that few others were prepared to acknowledge. David > On 3/30/2012 4:38 AM, David Nyman wrote: >> >> The problem with all this (as Kent makes explicit) is that there is >> nothing in the mathematics of the "game physics" that corresponds to >> this kind of momentary selection of subjective localisation. >> Unfortunately, his own proposal doesn't really solve the underlying >> problem, because although it can account, given the experimental >> situation, for my seeing spin-up and not spin-down (because the other >> doesn't objectively exist any longer) it cannot account for why the >> experience is of David making this observation rather than Brent > > > It does if you think experience is an epiphenomena of physics. Brent and > David are different physical systems and only one is looking at the system. > > Brent > > >> , or >> indeed here rather than there, or now rather than then. Subjective >> localisation is simply assumed, or trivialised, as in Einstein's >> remark “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a >> stubbornly persistent illusion”. > > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
