On 31 January 2014 01:52, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
The "we" of individual human beings relies on physical consistency because > that is a common sensory experience of the animal>organism>substance > context. The substance context however relies on the "we" of the Absolute > context. The biological context relies on those "we"s, and the animal > context relies on the biological "we"s. It's all nested but the bottom of > each extrinsic level is being supported by the top of the previous > intrinsic level. I'm not sure I fully grasp all of the above, but I would like to tackle you again on the POPJ, because I still can't see how your model can succeed in avoiding it. Let me start by telling you about a movie I streamed last night - "Inception" (I'm a bit behindhand on popular movies!). It was quite an enjoyable yarn, but it struck me as pretty flaky, even as science fiction, not least because the plot is built on the idea that dreams could be experienced (and even nested dream-within-dream) with near-waking "physical" consistency. This got me reflecting on what does indeed distinguish dreams from "waking reality" (acknowledging of course that both are virtual presentations from the personal perspective). I don't know about your dreams, but in mine things have the darnedest habit of disappearing or turning into something else when I look away and this, presumably, is because sleeping-dreams are different to waking-dreams in that their appearances are not in general stabilised by anything "extrinsic" to the brain and body. By extrinsic here I am not committing to the ultimate nature of the brain and its environment, merely that all our experiences - metaphorised as dreams, or in a more up-to-date image, a multi-player video-game - must depend on some generalised and consistent system of appearances for consistency and stabilisation. It turns out, indeed, that the system of appearances our internal video game depends on is detailed, consistent and stable to the most extraordinary degree; let us call this stable, exhaustive and reliably causally-complete set of appearances the game-physics. And the "avatars" that appear to us within the game - bodies and brains, our own and others' - turn out to follow the rules of the game-physics precisely in conformity with the set of appearances as a whole, to the furthermost extent we can explore. The logical consequence of the above is just this: Even if you consider that the sensory nature of that-which-exists extends, beyond our personal virtual presentations, to the whole of "reality itself", one can still not avoid the encounter in waking-dreams with avatars (including one's own) that cheerfully lay claim to sensory phenomena that are supernumerary in explaining their behaviour in terms of its own rules-of-appearance (i.e. the game-physics), and which they could not logically have access to in terms of those very rules. Hence these sensory phenomena cannot be the cause of these claims. This, again is the POPJ. ISTM that it is unavoidable in any schema, whether primitive-sensory or primitive-physical, in which no further logical entailment is discoverable in the causally-complete machinations of the game-physics. I've tried to set out the problem as clearly as I can and I would be grateful if you could respond directly with a reasoned consideration of how your theory might circumvent this formidable logical obstacle. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
