On 09 Jan 2013, at 20:56, David Nyman wrote:
On 9 January 2013 18:17, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
David Nyman's heuristic makes me think that they could be zombie,
but I am not sure this can work with comp.
Don't forget that we are speaking only of a heuristic, or guide for
thought. The idea is to evaluate what consequences might follow, for
the phenomenon of "observation" in general, if it were to be
considered to be the exclusive property of a single, abstract knower
which continuously sampled, one by one, the set of all possible
observer moments putatively associable with some underlying 3p
system. It is not however, as such, a proposal for a novel mechanism
of any sort. Consequently ISTM that any fears relating to zombies
would be justified only if one had a principled reason to suppose
that observable continuations of very low measure would somehow be
inaccessible to such a heuristic.
OK.
I am still not sure this does not simply add a layer of difficulty,
because it is not clear (to me) what can possibly be such a sampling.
My contention is that this could not be so, by definition, but that
nonetheless such continuations would be highly atypical "events" in
the universal stream of consciousness.
OK.
By this I don't simply mean that they are unusual in themselves, but
rather that any given OM (like the one "you" are experiencing when
you read this) is very unlikely to be such a continuation. In terms
of the heuristic, all experiences in the universal stream are alike
"partitioned" from each other by the intrinsic structure of "global
memory", but some experiences are destined to be remembered much
less frequently than others. Of course, in some sense, whatever is
being "observed" is always a "zombie" (i.e. we cannot discern
consciousness by observable phenomena alone) but this should not be
understood to mean that the relevant OMs, associated with each
"zombie avatar", are not accessible in due course and in due measure.
OK.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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