On 25 Jan 2014, at 14:15, David Nyman wrote:
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 gues that's why some people want time, if not present-time, as a
primitive. I can understand the feeling, but I think that with comp it
is a sort of delusion.
I realise that "right now" is an intrinsically indexical concept
Yes. It fits quite well with Galileo, Einstein and Everett sort of
relativity, but with a wider scope defined notably by the arithmetical
truth.
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", ...
OK
... unchangingly.
That might be the word too much imo. Like a number, a computational
state, even considered among the computation going through it, does
not seem to me to be an object on which change can even be applied. It
is out of time and space considerations. The 1p associated to it is
related to computations which, from that 1p view, correspond to a
dynamical scenario. But the time aspect is a construct from that (set
of) number relations.
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.
The problem for me was a bit of the contrary. The theaetetical
definition of consciousness or knowledge explain "easily" the lack of
symmetry, because you recover it through it. "Bp & p" does provides
the non symmetry, and indeed even an antisymmetry making a 1p-moment
irreversible.
But, by UDA, we have to recover physics and its core symmetry, notably
through something like "p->[]<>p", as I will explain probably in the
modal thread.
But how to get symmetry from non symmetry? That was the problem.
Eventually, the miracle s that when we restrict the "p" on the sigma_1
p (the "computable "p"), we do extract a symmetry from the
antisymmetry, with making the logic of physics collapsing into pure
logic (non modal) logic.
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 don't think so. "permanently" again introduces "time" where there is
none.
Imagine that I stop your (digital, say) brain for some period of time,
you will not feel anything.
The feeling of time is only brought by the dynamical aspect of the
computations, which involves the steps of those computations, which
are defined through atemporal number relations.
I am not sure why we should expect our experience to be confined in a
permanent single pigeon hole.
i.e. not momentarily, but unchangingly.
Change is intrinsically relative, I think.
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".
I think that this introduce a difficulty which is not present in the
purely indexical approach. A present moment defines its memorized
past, and potential futures. The "right now" is a particular
semantical fixed point. It is probably universal, but just in the
sense that all self-reflecting creature can find it by introspection.
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.
I think that is correct, and indeed an indirect consequence of
incompleteness for logic of the first person.
The "Bp & p" defines the "solipsist" or the universal first person,
and the breaking of the symmetry.
At the least, it seems possible that our experience (i.e. from the
"inside") is not inconsistent with this intuition.
Indeed. It is even necessary.
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,
OK
in due course and in due measure.
But this I don't understand. Due course relatively to what?
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:
Yes, and that is the case from the 1p perspective. We live this,
despite it is highly plausibly false. There are other person, and
Everett confirms the existence of the 1p-plural expected by
computationalists.
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?
But why this second "one at a time"? Why not the single "one at a
time" easily explained in computer science? My desk computer can
access only the memory of its hard disk, not the hard disk of somepne
else computer.
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.
Nice.
I often say that consciousness is not 100% explainable with comp.
Despite I really do not understand the need and the benefits of the
'flaslight" intuition, I have often the feeling that you are
navigating around what indeed will (and has to) remain quite
mysterious with the comp hypothesis. But I would not say it is a
"right now" feeling, as this is explained by the indexical logics we
get from incompleteness. it is more in the consciousness per se of
that feeling.
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
OK. That's Everett understanding of QM, or just QM 'taken literally",
which I think we must do in science, if only to find out more quickly
the discrepancies with the observation. It might be science-fiction,
it is actually good science in disguise.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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