On 22 Jan 2014, at 19:06, David Nyman wrote:
On 22 January 2014 09:45, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> 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? 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.
But each state sum up a sequence. This is common in the 1p and 3p
perspective. How could a machine distinguish different flashlight
sequencing?
The logical alternative would seem to be to get "stuck", monad-like,
in whatever pigeon hole you first thought of.
In the 1p perspective, the past sequence is remember, in virtue of the
computation and its handling of the self-reference. And the (immediate
and long term) future is expected in the same way, and then confirmed
in the states which extends the past sequence. If the ordering of the
flaslight is changed, or if more than one flashlightning is used, why
should any experience change?
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.
I continue I have difficulty to make sense of this. It looks like
projecting he 1p view on the 3p description.
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.
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.
Let us take the WM-duplication. Suppose that the guy in Helsinki is
told that the "randomly chosen unique flaslight sequence will
illuminate W "just" after the duplication (if this makes sense).
Should he decide that P(W) = 1 and P(M) = 0? Is the guy in M, which
exists (even with just Behavior Mechanism), a zombie?
Bruno
David
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