On 1/23/2015 2:21 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 10:34 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/22/2015 4:05 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 8:27 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/21/2015 3:48 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
If you completely discard the concept of "truth" and replace it
entirely
with "evolutionary usefulness" - does that change anything?
I think it might. For example, suppose we all share the same
consciousness. It
is evolutionary useful to maintain the illusion that this is not the
case
(thus my previous rant).
If you "start with consciousness" then it is fundamental that
consciousness if
not shared - otherwise I'd be conscious of it.
I don't agree that that follows. You can realise this intuitively from the
experience of dreaming: you can dream that you are someone else, or in
completely
different circumstances and forget that you're in a dream.
But that's not separate, I remember the dream. If I don't remember the
dream, is it
me? Is it me because the dream and reality share a body that can't be both
at once?
Depends on what you mean by "me". If you mean the contents of the experience of being
Brent, then you're someone else. But the point here is that, if we start with
consciousness, then we could all be different experiential contents for the same thing.
Consider this toy model: ultimate reality is a direct acyclic graph of all possible
observer moments. Links represent possible transformations of one observer moment to
another. Theoretical physics essentially approximates the transformation function,
telling us which transformations are valid. Every observer moment is eternal in a sense,
because the illusion of time arises "inside" the moment. With consciousness as a brute
fact, the observer moments where I feel like I'm me and you feel like you're you are
just that -- observer moments in the eternal graph. Time and separation are contents of
the many dreams. Specifically, time is an illusion created by the structure of the
graph: all downstream moments in terms of the generation function feel like the past.
I have no confidence in this model -- I am just trying to illustrate how a single
consciousness can be consistent with our perceptions of reality.
But you don't say what a single consciousness is in the model. I'd it's connected sets
that have no branches, in which case there are a lot of different ones and they're not shared.
Brent
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