On 23 January 2014 21:18, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> The question then arises: Could the intuition of such a "multiplex" of
> random momentary filterings possibly give an adequate account of the
> myriad, ordered experiential trajectories of each and every one of "us"?
>
>
> I can't see how *that* randomness makes sense.
> It seems to me more like a conversion/emanation like in Plotinus. A back
> and forth done by the inner God between matter and god.
>
I suspect that the use of the term "random" here has become somewhat of a
red herring. In Hoyle's original storyline, his physicist protagonist
explains that momentary states of consciousness, whomever or whatever they
referred to, could be metaphorised as self-ordering "pigeon holes"
(observer moments, more or less). It's clear from the context that he's
thinking about some sort of Barbour/Deutsch physical multiverse scenario.
He then describes a thought experiment where some guy wanders about
haphazardly looking into the pigeon holes: What would this be like? Well,
he says, from the point of view of the guy himself (i.e. the outside or
extrinsic view), it would no doubt seem completely haphazard, but from the
point of view of the pigeon holes themselves (i.e. the inside or intrinsic
view) everything would seem "normal".
Now, he doesn't explicitly address any issues of differential distribution
of related classes of pigeon hole in this thought experiment, and in fact
he even says that there would be no way of knowing (from the inside) if the
guy were to visit the same pigeon hole repeatedly (e.g. on a whim). This
doesn't seem quite right to me, because that would, in effect, alter the
measure of some sub-class of pigeon holes. Consequently, when I re-present
his heuristic I simply make the stipulation that the imagined sequence of
visits to the entire class of pigeon holes should be "neutral" with respect
not only to the self-ordering aspect of the pigeon holes, but to also to
their distribution. IOW, the sequence should be random.
I suspect after our various conversations, that given Hoyle's physicalist
assumptions, his heuristic is difficult or impossible to apply unmodified
in a computationalist context. However, on this occasion I actually posed
the question of how one could intuit "normal" experience in the context of
a block universe/multiverse to Liz, who had said (and repeated thereafter)
that she had no problem getting this intuition even without Hoyle's
flashlight analogy. Maybe the difference in intuition is because she
doesn't think about it in Hoyle's "universalist" way, although ISTM this is
implicit in the heuristic (i.e. the "guy" is the unique and
non-simultaneous "owner" of the experiences in all the pigeon holes).
Without the flashlight, I think what people do is think of themselves as
situated in some pigeon hole or other and then, as it were, imaginatively
"select" some continuation sequence of pigeon holes from there.
But all pigeon holes could equally be considered to be such "points of
departure" and consequently all continuation sequences are, likewise always
"in play". But it makes no intuitive sense, AFAICS, to think of sequences
of pigeon-hole/moments as "simultaneous" in anything like the sense of the
mutual co-existence of the elements of an underlying block structure
(again, assuming a physicalist 3p interpretation). After all, I'm not still
having breakfast as I type these words, nor have I yet gone to bed, nor for
that matter can I access any of "your" experiences from here. Hence it
would seem that on further analysis this version logically collapses into
Hoyle's way of thinking about it (which, I suppose, was his point).
By the way, I have been following your pedagogical excursions with Liz, but
she is much more willing and adept in this respect, alas, than I seem able
to be. Nonetheless I am continuing to develop my appreciation of your
method, with my computationalist hat on. Actually, I have another metaphor
that I rely on - mutatis mutandi - in this regard (which I may have
mentioned before) - Borges's Library of Babel. Borges's story, of course,
is really about how intractable any quasi-infinite library of mere textual
descriptions would be in practice. However, if one "upgrades" Borges's
Babel so that it becomes an arithmetico-logical Programmatic Library, a
remarkable possibility seems to open up: The narratives therein - or rather
their various heroes and heroines - may become self-filtering and
self-interpreting. In short, their lives and experiences may become
(indexically) real. This is then the place where the zombie idea appears at
its sharpest. If we are indeed to think of ourselves, at least in part, as
machines in this sense, then it seems we have no alternative but to trust
that a certain class of seemingly incorrigible indexical beliefs possessed
by such machines must be true. For were they to be false, then we too,
whilst asserting precisely the same beliefs, would necessarily be zombies
ourselves!
It is interesting that some leaders in current physics (Susskind, Tegmark
et al.) are impelled to place themselves somewhat more in the general
vicinity of your ideas, while continuing, essentially, to put the mind-body
problem under the rug. I suppose the Hard Problem might seem a little less
professionally disturbing if we can tell ourselves that it involves only
the mind ("not my subject") rather than the body (goddam, just when we
seemed to be getting closer to a final TOE).
David
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