On 25 January 2014 09:21, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> 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.
>
Yes indeed, it is the amnesia that "compartmentalises" us. But it's the
"right now" that strikes me (and, I presume, struck Hoyle) as something of
an an equivocation, at least in the pigeon hole analogy. I realise that
"right now" is an intrinsically indexical concept and Hoyle quite
definitely means us to understand that each co-existent pigeon hole in his
3p-block concept can indeed be interpreted as its own "right now",
unchangingly. But he also sees that if he leaves it at that, he has not yet
explicitly defined any principle that could suffice to break the unchanging
symmetry of the co-existing block from the 1p perspective. In this bare
scenario, each of us should rather expect our experience, if anything, to
be permanently confined to that of a single pigeon hole "right now" - i.e.
not momentarily, but unchangingly. And what would that be like? Not very
much, it might seem.
Consequently, he explicitly posits (and purely, I insist, as a sleight of
intuition) an "unobservable change" - the replacement of one pigeon hole by
another in the unique context of what must be understood, unequivocally, as
a single, universal "right now". IOW, Hoyle's contention is that each
moment of consciousness can be intuited as the singularised state of a
universal solipsist whose successive re-combinations of remembering and
forgetting suffice to break the panoptic symmetry. At the least, it seems
possible that our experience (i.e. from the "inside") is *not
inconsistent*with this intuition. It occurred to me, in passing, that
this idea of
unobservable but consequential change has some analogy (but no more than
that) with the way our vision fixates successive points via "saccades"
which are themselves unobserved. Despite the unobservability of any
transition between visual fixations, we can hardly consistently believe
that our gaze is merely confined to any one of them.
The peculiar consequence of such an intuition is that, from the perspective
of David's typing *these very words*, Julius Caesar is no more the owner of
an experience "right now" than David continues to be the owner of the
experience of a moment ago. The only experience that obtains "right now" is
what "I" happen to be aware of, as a proxy for the universal solipsist to
whom both "I" and "right now" are uniquely applicable. In this way,
according to Hoyle, every moment of relative experience is lived out, in
mutual exclusion, in due course and in due measure.
I suppose, at least, we are asked to see that this multi-solipsistic
intuition is no more open to experiential refutation than the
mini-solipsism that is the butt of so many philosophical jokes ("Why are
there so few of us solipsists?"). After all, from the perspective of the
singular intersection of a universal "right now" with some element of a
3p-block, we should indeed expect to be confronted, in effect, with a
"zombie world" devoid of directly-observable consciousness: and that is
indeed consistent with (and the persistent puzzle of) our experience. But
do we, in truth, live out every possible moment, "one at a time", in due
course and in due measure? Well, somebody, on our behalf, does precisely
this, do they not?
However, after our many discussions, I suspect that Hoyle's universalist
intuition (no doubt unsurprisingly) must be modified in the
computationalist view and I think I am gradually starting to appreciate
more and more what the differences may be. In fact I've been giving the
matter a lot of thought recently. But that is meat for another conversation.
In answer to your queries about Hoyle, I've no idea whether he met or knew
about Everett, but he certainly considered the multiverse idea. Consider
the following excerpt from "October the First is Too Late" (1965):
"There could even be completely different universes. Go back to my decaying
nucleus. Hook up a bomb which explodes according to whether you have decay
of a nucleus or not. Make the bomb so big that it becomes a doomsday
machine. Let it be capable - if exploded - of wiping out all life on the
Earth. Let the whole thing go for a critical few seconds, you remember we
were considering whether a nucleus would decay in a particular ten seconds?
Do we all survive or don't we?
My guess is that inevitably we appear to survive, because there is a
division, the world divides into two, into two completely disparate stacks
of pigeon holes. In one, a nucleus undergoes decay, explodes the bomb, and
wipes us out. But the pigeon holes in that case never contain anything
further about life on the Earth. So although those pigeon holes might be
activated, there could never be any awareness that an explosion had taken
place. In the other block, the Earth would be safe, our lives would
continue - to put it in the usual phrase. Whenever the spotlight of
consciousness hit those pigeon holes we should be aware of the Earth and we
should decide the bomb had not exploded."
Below is a link to some more quotes from the book. By the way I notice on
re-reading that Hoyle has his protagonist hedge his bets somewhat on the
possible significance of the "flashlight", but hey, it's fiction and
science fiction at that! I hope Hoyle would have forgiven me for
plagiarising and manipulating his idea for my own nefarious purposes!
http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/hoyle.htm
David
David
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