On 23 January 2014 07:06, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 22 January 2014 09:45, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I think I said the fl;ashlight wasn't needed, so it isn't there, and so
>> nothing moves it around. The pigeonholes stand for states of consciousness,
>> so they perceive what it would illuminate, which is their own contents. But
>> they can perceive those without it.
>
>
> Do you really find that you can make intuitive sense of the pigeon hole
> metaphor without the flashlight?
>
Yes.
> I must admit I've never been able to. From a 3p perspective, the idea is
> that the relations between pigeon holes map out a multiplicity of implied
> spatial-temporal trajectories, "all there together". From a 1p perspective
> this would seem to transform to a fixed array of momentary points-of-view,
> again all there (or "illuminated") together. I think that any attempt to
> intuit a relativised personal history from this metaphor cannot avoid the
> imaginative association with one or another *sequence* of pigeon holes.
> The logical alternative would seem to be to get "stuck", monad-like, in
> whatever pigeon hole you first thought of.
>
Yes there's a sequence, or foliation as physicists like to call it.
>
> What Hoyle was suggesting, I think, is that the necessary intuitions of a
> "flow" of consciousness can all be collapsed, as it were, into the notion
> of a *unique* sequence (in a purely logical sense) of randomly selected
> pigeon holes. Such an "absolute" sequence must then contain all relativised
> sequences, with their logical inter-relations and differential measures
> preserved. Oddly enough, any notion of "flow", as entailing the observation
> of transition between holes, is still unnecessary in this schema; indeed it
> would be incoherent. The sequencing of pigeon holes carries no relation of
> "next" or "previous"; the spatial-temporal structure of each pigeon hole is
> already conceived as both "dynamic" and self-ordering, like Barbour's time
> capsules.
>
Yes it's exactly like Barbour's time capsules, AFAIK. (It's a while since I
read his book.)
>
> Rather, the purpose of the logical sequence of pigeon holes - i.e. the
> beam of the "flashlight" - is to furnish an intuition that avoids the
> aforementioned "monadic catastrophe", by conceiving a unique multiplex of
> all possible ("parallel") relative sequences. The cost of this heuristic is
> that all the pigeon holes now belong to a sort of universal, solipsistic
> multiple-personality that lives them (and, by proxy, "us") "one moment at a
> time". It's an interesting idea, with more ramifications than might appear
> at first blush, and thinking in this way often sheds an intriguingly
> different light on the various thought experiments about identity and
> succession we love to argue about on this list.
>
No doubt. Of course it's also a straightforward logical consequence of the
block universe concept as espoused by Netwon, Einstein, Minkowski, etc.
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