We still have to decide who's thoughts or dreams this all is anyway, and their might be a way to tweak the thinker or dreamer into a response. However, pondering the means to accomplish this will not keep me up at night. Har! Har!
-----Original Message----- From: Jason Resch <[email protected]> To: Everything List <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, Apr 13, 2016 8:54 am Subject: Re: Solipsism revisited On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 5:26 PM, smitra <[email protected]> wrote: What we experience is always a computation performed by our brain and the best theories we have will not allow one to definitely say that you are not a brain in a vat. Another thing is that you are always located in your present moment, so any notion of the past is just a theory, you cannot distinguish between a fictitious past and what you think is the real past. Everything you know now about what you think is the past is just a consequence of what exists in your brain right now. Then invoking physics to argue that the concept of an external universe including its history is correct is not going to work in a rigorous way, because according to quantum mechanics there will be contributions to the amplitude of your present observations coming from anomalous histories. While these contributions are suppressed by astronomically large factors, if you write down a theory where you make them exactly zero, you get a flawed theory that will violate unitary time evolution. I think it is even looser than that. When you're not thinking of what color your toothbrush is, your "mind algorithm" exists within a context of all possibilities mutually consistent with your current state of awareness at that point in time. When the memory makes it to your conscious mind, you select or narrow down the set of universes your mind can belong to, but then expand the set for other things no longer in your mind, such as what your mother's face looks like (when you are only thinking of your toothbrush's color) The difference between, say, 10^(-10^1000000000) and 0 is actually a big deal here, it proves that our existence is not confined to some naive classical notion of a single universe. The picture that we instead get is radically different than the one painted by most physicists who ignore the small details and argue on the basis of the flawed notion of "for all practical matters". Once we find physical constants compatible with our existence, discovering continued decimal expansions of those constants is a bit like following the trail of a random number generator's output. Until a physicist narrows it down, you again live in a mix of possible physical universes. Or you might say, before you learn the values by reading it in a book, those insignificant digits might be a mix of all possible values. A more natural picture that is consistent with all of physics (all = including the astronomically small amplitudes), is the idea that what exists are just algorithms. An algorithm can be specified by mathematical rules, it specifies the relation between input and output. From the point of view of an algorithm, a universe may appear to exist, but what really exists is that algorithm. Other algorithms then also exist but they have to be considered as different universes. So, what exists is a multiverse where each element is an algorithm in some specific computational state. This sounds like Bruno's theory: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html In particular, this means that you are your own universe, and one second ago you were a different person, so that person is a different universe. Time evolution is an information preserving mapping between different universes, there is nothing that really evolves or changes. This remind's me of Wei Dai's (this list's founder) "really simple" explanation of QM: http://www.weidai.com/qm-interpretation.txt Also, the person you think you were when you were a small child is the same child that ended up being persons that are totally different from you, including people who died centuries ago. In fact, I claim that if you pick two random persons, say, Genghis Khan and Albert Einstein then under inverse time evolution the child they were will converge to each other and eventually merge with each other. What differentiates to meditative thoughtless minds? Is an amnesiac or meditative mind a focal point for different consciousnesses? When a mind reaches a point of zero information content as it approaches death is it the same as a newly formed mind with zero information content before birth? This is true even for mothers and their children, the fact that the mother gave birth to her children is not a problem because a fetus in a womb cannot detect in which womb it is. As you go back in time, what it is aware of and what its mother was aware of when it was a fetus become identical. You might enjoy this: http://philpapers.org/archive/ZUBOST.pdf When we were born, we wouldn't immediately have known about modern technology, so the experiences for the newborn baby do not localize it in time all that much. If you were born in the year 1960, you could just as well have born in the year 1800, 1200 or 2260. This means that you were born in all these possibilities, you started to branch out into the different possibilities only after you became aware of these facts. But, of course, it's not consistent to leave other animals out of the equation. In principle one has to consider all possible algorithms, some of which are implemented by the brains of spiders, T-Rex or some alien animal that doesn't exist here on Earth. To quote the above paper: "I still believe, as I did in 1961, that if the pattern of a life is anywhere,anytime extended, that life itself is extended. But now I believe as wellthat there is no limit to the type of one's experience, that all experiencebelongs to you, to me, to the one self of experience.Suppose you are killed on the way to visit a friend. If anywhere, anytime in all reality there exists the experience of that visit, without theintervening death, you are there, making that visit. But everyone else, allconscious beings, will be there with you, as you. And you will be with themtoo, in everything they experience, because they are you.There is no alienated self that ceases to exist when a particular organismdies. Neither is there a real progress of experiences, a moving present. Andso death, when seen as an obliteration of the person and an end of hisexperience, is an illusion." Jason -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
