On 04 Feb 2014, at 00:12, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 February 2014 18:53, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
I will come back on this when I have time
Thanks.
but - to continue my suggestions re SF stories - "Flux" by Michael
Moorcock addresses the "momentary frog question" rather nicely.
Philosophically, at least, it is always possible that we ARE just
momentary frogs.
I can't seem to locate a reasonably priced copy of this. You would
be doing me a most tremendous favour if you could precise the
relevant bits?
Actually, I've had the glimmer of an idea. It's not fully worked
out, but I'll just dump what I have. When Mad Max talks about the
bird view, the assumption is that it's a panoptic (god's eye) view
that encompasses all the momentary frogs together. IOW, all the frog
perspectives are available "simultaneously" from this extrinsic
perspective. When he talks about the frog view, it's natural to
think of the focus as collapsing right down to that of a single
momentary frog.
But somehow, that is what we have to do, if we want to trust the
doctor, who will really captured such "frog view", in the 3p sense.
Of course, you are right that the content, 3p and 1p, of that "view"
is related with many other "frog view", even all in some sense (that
is why we talk on UD and block universe, the FPI, etc.).
But perhaps we should rather think of the frog focus as continuing
to be fundamentally panoptic (i.e. encompassing all the frog
perspectives) except that "down there" the extrinsic simultaneity is
intrinsically broken by the discrete perspective of each momentary
frog. If so, one could then see Hoyle's heuristic as a frog's eye
view of the experiential consequences of this broken simultaneity.
I think that is is what happen when we apply the theaeteus definition
on provability, except that provability is already a symmetry broker,
then the Theaetetus makes it even more assymetrical (irreflexive,
even), and the miracle is more in the fact that, defining the physical
reality from that move, we get the core symmetry back. I hope I will
be able to clarify this for you with the self-reference (modal) logics.
Bruno
David
On 3 February 2014 03:19, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote:
On 2 February 2014 03:42, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
To answer the question about the frogs. We imagine we are an
"extended frog" because of memory; without it we really would be
stuck in the present moment, a series of individual isolated moments
- and completely unable to function, of course. (If you haven't seen
"Memento" do so because it's very good AND it shows the illusion of
continuity up very nicely.)
Ironically I don't have any more time to write on this! Later...
Actually I was lucky enough to see Memento when it was premiered at
Sundance in 2001, I think. Great movie.
Yes, I've got the bit about memory - this allows each "momentary
frog" to perceive itself as an "extended frog". But now we seem to
have conjured up a collection of momentary frogs each one of which
imagines itself to be an extended frog with more or less history, if
you see what I mean. What I'm interested in is why or how this could
resolve into a singular momentary frog that has the impression of
one history that keeps extending itself. One can see that this must
be true of each of the momentary frogs, each stuck in its pigeon
hole, so to speak, but the logic we are discussing seems to imply
that each such frog is deluded and that its particular history
(memory, that is ) never in fact changes.
The more I think about this the worse it gets. I realise that I can
never actually prove that I'm not just one of those momentary frogs
stuck in a pigeon hole with my memories of a past history, because
that frog could never observe any "transition" to a future moment
(i.e. one not yet encoded in its memory) in which that proof would
occur. But accepting that "I" am just one such momentary frog seems
about as difficult as believing I am not conscious simply because I
apparently can't appeal to consciousness to explain why I'm having
the thought that I'm conscious (another thread!). I think this is
what Hoyle was getting at with his flashlight: we can't seem to help
thinking of ourselves successively as one frog at different times.
His flashlight idea just pumps the intuition that though we can
consider the pigeon holes in any order we like, we can't seem to
avoid considering them in some sort of order, even if that order is
merely logical, not temporal (because the temporal ordering is
already in the pigeon holes themselves).
David
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