Hi John Mikes,
Very Brunoish!
besides: you may invest in an "s" at the end of my (last) name, my
son even puts "sh" as an ending.
I don't care if John Mike is duplicated anywhere.
John Mikes
(active on THIs list since ~1998?)
All my apologies John. It is* because* you are a long standing every-
thinger, that the name misspelling probability became high, if only by
repetition. I will try to not doing that error again.
Brno
On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 17 Feb 2013, at 21:36, John Mikes wrote:
Bruno - we, at least, having learned the English language, should
'dig' into the meaning of the words. "Chosen" is the result of a
selection from more than one alternates.
Who are the others, from which WE may be "CHOSEN"?
Perhaps those who don't handle so well the english language. (I am
joking).
Look, I am not the one saying that we have been chosen. On the
contrary, I defended the Copernician idea, that we are not chosen at
all. Like I said below, comp explain why we *might* feel like
having been chosen.
the devils in hell, or the angels in heaven? or the other animals?
This is why I like to clarify the WORDS before submerging into
verbose treatises on debatable concepts.
Then again: "chosen" is ambiguous, e.g. in a certain decimation
(war? revolution?) the 'chosen' get executed, so it is not such a
joy to be CHOSEN.
You are right.
Anyone surviving a crash plane, among many passengers who died,
develops a kind of guilt and a feeling of having been chosen, but
this is an "illusion" easily explained by comp (and accepted by
those surviving passengers most of the time, but this might not
change their direct feeling).
If you are duplicated into Washington and Moscow, in the usual
manner, both the copies will feel like having be chosen for that
city, but there is only memories, personal diaries and direct access
to them.
Now comp is not developed so much that we can be sure that we are
NOT chosen, independently of the fact that we might find this not
really reasonable to think.
That might indeed remain forever undecided, except locally, when,
after dying you wake up in a matrix build by our descendant 10^4
after JC, and remembering things like "Oh, I will try to relive that
John's Mike life which looks interesting". Then, you will know,
locally, who made the choice of being "John Mike", for awhile.
Perhaps a descendent of you.
Bruno
John Mikes
On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 27 Jan 2013, at 23:35, freqflyer07281972 wrote:
Hey everyone,
I've been following this group a lot. I read it everyday and enjoy
all of the wonderful stuff that comes up, even if some of it tends
towards ad hominem, argument from authority, and petitio principi.
Hey, we're humans, right? That means we get to make these
fallacies, in good conscience or bad.
Anyway, I wondered about what anyone/everyone thought about the
notion of 'chosenness' as a way to understand where we are here in
the world. It seems to me that concepts like MWI, Bruno's comp/
mech hypothesis and the 'dreams of numbers' ideas of subjectivity,
and even Leibniz's 'best of all possible worlds' don't actually do
something like flee away from our everyday responsibility to
accept the basic fact that we have been CHOSEN -- and when I say
this, please don't immediately put a bunch of theological baggage
on it. I'm not saying God chose this reality as opposed to
another, although this might be a convenient shorthand. But what I
am saying is that, out of all the staggering possibilities that we
know exist with regards to our universe, our galaxy, our solar
system, our planet, our society, and even our individual selves,
things could have very easily turned out to be different than they
were. The fact that they have turned out in just this way and not
another indicates this kind of chosenness, and along with it,
comes a certain degree of responsibility, I guess?
It seems to me that all the various 'everything' hypotheses (MWI,
comp, Leibniz, and others) try to apply the Copernican principle
to its breaking point. True enough, there is from a purely 3p
point of view nothing special about our cosmic situation re: our
planet and our sun. BUT, from an existential 1p point of view
there is a huge privilege that we have, i.e. we are sentient
observers, who love, feel pain, feel desire, and long for
transcendence.
Moreover, the 3p point of view is a pure abstraction, kind of like
eating the picture of a meal rather than the actual meal. How do
we know what any kind of 3p account of truth would be? What would
it even look like? A universe with no observers. A falling tree
without a hearer/listener. This, to me, is nonsense.
Aren't things like MWI of quantum physics and comp hypothesis of
universal dovetailer trying to, at a fundamental and existential
level, an attempt to try to run away from the concreteness and
absolute 'givenness' (gift) of the world as we find it?
Those things are not necessarily in opposition, once we find a way
to attribute first-person-ness to some entities.
We only try to figure out what is happening.
And isn't our role, in creation, as freely choosing beings (sorry,
John Clark, free will is more than just a noise) to choose what
will make other people with us now and in the future feel more
love and less pain? And isn't this why we were chosen?
I don't think we are chosen, at least no more than insects and
plants. We have the tools for explaining whay we feel unique, and
chosen, but that can be a sort of illusion, like with personal
identity. But *we* can make choice, indeed. This makes intuitive
sense, and is explainable in mechanical terms.
Bruno
I'll go back to lurking now, but I'd appreciate any thoughts you
might have on this reflection of mine.
Cheers,
Dan
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to everything-
[email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to everything-
[email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
