On 24 Jan 2014, at 19:46, David Nyman wrote:
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.
At which time wrote it this. Did he knew Everett (1957)?
He then describes a thought experiment where some guy wanders about
haphazardly looking into the pigeon holes: What would this be like?
In salvia reports, some people often describes a big wheel constituted
of all "parallel realities", with a notion of choice: you can choose
which reality to come back. Most of the time this is accompanied by
panic, as you feel that none of those reality are the correct one, and
the experiencer has a feeling that he cannot come back at the right
place.
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".
It looks like like comparing the first hypostase, and the third one,
like an oscillation between "p " and "Bp & p". But it is hard to not
explains this by imagination, as it is hard to ascribe consciousness
to the 0-person point of view, but I am really ignorant on this. If
the experience with dissociative product can be related to this, the
experience might be a double amnesia. We would have two type of
consciousness, each amnesic of the others. Some non-REM sleep
experience might also provide clues in that direction. But all this is
on the fringe of the non communicable.
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.
Why. I am not sure. If the experience are not distinguishible, they
are the same from the 1p, and indeed it would alter the measure if the
recurrence is related to the many arithmetical recurrent state. This
makes me think that the actual running of the UD might play the role
of the "flashlight". After all the redundancy of the computations is
what make a measure meaningful. There is no program capable of doing
what a UD, or arithmetic, does, without introducing that redundancy,
which does not depend on the formalism used for the basic ontology
(number, game of life, combinators, etc.)
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.
But I continue to find this "super" experience a bit weird. It is like
attributing some consciousness to the UD itself (except that in the UD
the states are obtained in a non random way, even if comes to
something equivalent to randomness, by the dovetailing and the
intrinsic complexity of the UD* (it is comparable to the halting
oracle, in the limit).
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.
I tend to follow her. That random experience seem to add difficulties,
and I think that me, and Liz probably, intuit that the indexical
analysis is enough. There is just no time: the experiences are
intrinsically relative.
When I was young I often thought that from the point of view of
anybody, we have the same age. Julius Caesar, from his point of view
is born not a long time ago, and is still alive and should have the
same age as me, from his points of view. It is like a "p-time", except
that everyone experience the same age, in a reality where he does not
die. But even this is brought by the "illusion of time".
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.
Yes. But we can still believe in the "universalist view", through the
amnesia and the return in the universal baby state, which then can be
related to the universal consciousness of the universal person. In
that sense we are right now the same person, but relatively amnesic of
all particularities which distinguish us.
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).
Or the arithmetical "block". Once you are OK with the notion of block
multiverse, the difference between physics and arithmetic is very
tiny. Well I don't know. hard to define a block structure of the view
from inside arithmetic, those are intrinsically lived as dynamical,
and particular. I have to think on this.
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.
No. You need to read my post to get the shadow of an idea.
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.
OK. I can understand.
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.
Yes. I think it is the point. That is why we don't need (and worse:
cannot use) the physical to singularize the experience.
(And Borges is very good. it inspired Everett, and more than one novel
reflect a deep metaphysical introspection in his work).
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.
Yes, even by definition in the Theaetetus definition: Bp & p. We
consider the part of the beliefs which fit with the truth.
For were they to be false, then we too, whilst asserting precisely
the same beliefs, would necessarily be zombies ourselves!
Yes. And I thought the dual of this could lead to a proof, by absurdo,
of computationalism! Indeed, it seems that machine can do your
reasoning here, and lead, if comp is true, to the machines to
correctly proving that they are zombie. Machines would know that they
are zombies and that, apparently, makes no sense.
That does not work, because in the 3p that might still make sense. We
can conceive that a zombie machine might rationally assert that she is
a zombie.
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).
Yes, indeed!
Best,
Bruno
David
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