On 12 June 2014 04:53, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11 Jun 2014, at 02:22, Russell Standish wrote: > >> As for mechanism? There won't be one, certainly not sharable >> scientifically, anyway. Any number of arcane rituals or spells might >> work, or might not. For me, I don't think this stuff gets much beyond >> bar talk - but maybe Liz can weave this into one of her novels :). >> > > Hmm... you have still to convince her that it makes sense :) >
Please do, but otherwise I think I just have to assume p-zombies in some branches. So a person would be a "garden of forking paths" laid out by deterministic physics, within which their conscious mind could move around (within limits). So the p-zombies are, so to speak, the materialist / eliminativist versions of people, while consciousness is something that can flow through the "network" provided by the p-zombies. Whether this can be made to work in a dramatic sense is more of a challenge! George RR Martin (of "Game of Thrones" fame) wrote a short story in which someone invented a way to go back in time along their own world-tube to an earlier point, where they could make a different decision from the one they made originally, and thereby create a new personal history (and appear to die in their "previous" history). This would be kind of similar, but without the time travel aspect. > (I think I can make sense of it ... for a fraction of the resulting > people, but that is a priori self-selection, or wishful thinking). Philip > Dick wrote a novel where people use the Yi-King. It can help to take a > difficult decision. > I think that may have been "A Maze of Death". The first PKD novel I read, which is always an important experience in anyone's life. -- 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/d/optout.
