On 20 Apr 2017 12:57 a.m., "John Clark" <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 6:56 AM, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've often wondered whether Hoyle's heuristic could be a way of > short-cutting this dispute. Hoyle gives us a way to think about every > subjective moment > As a kid I remember reading Fred Hoyle's Novel " October the First Is Too Late " and in it he wrote about consciousness for about half a paragraph, is that what you're talking about? Yes, I'm talking about that novel. I too read it more than forty years ago. However I recently re-read it and I can assure you that the treatment of conscious experience in the manner described is both extensive and central to the theme of the novel. Hoyle went out of the way to emphasise that he took his "heuristic" seriously as a scientist, as his former student John Gribbin fully attested. Julian Barbour also acknowledges Hoyle's priority in the notion of subjectivity as captured by time capsules, an essentially equivalent notion. > > > Essentially the heuristic invites us to think of all subjective > experiences, aka observer moments, as a single logical serialisation in > which relative spatial and temporal orientation is internal to each moment. > Well yes, but all that's really saying is that we have a subjective feeling of time and space, but we already knew that. It goes well beyond that, as the narrative is at pains to set out. Hoyle's physicist protagonist invites the other main character to place himself in the subjective position represented by any of the pigeon holes, in any order. Then he asks him to explain what he thinks his subjective experience would be. His response (the guy is very quick on the uptake) is that his experience would appear to be perfectly normally sequenced from a psycho-historical point of view, despite random ordering from an external perspective. He also immediately grasps that any number of apparently individualised perspectives could be "interleaved" in this manner whilst retaining psycho-historical continuity for each. As I remember it Hoyle talked about events (that is to say a time and a place) being in pigeon holes in no particular order and consciousness is like a light flashing on a sequence of pigeon hole i n a very particular order. The set of pigeon holes you have to work with is the same as the set I have, the thing that makes you different than me is that the sequence of light flashes illuminating those pigeon holes is different for you and me. Yes, more or less. Hoyle's explicit conceptual point is that a single common agent could be occupying all these perceptual positions, in whatever extrinsic order, and the net subjective result would be as if you, me or any other notionally sentient entities were experiencing completely separated and sequenced personal histories. But this is just what one would expect, for example, of any computational device capable of compartmentalising one program's states from another's. Hence it establishes the distinction I mentioned between the notion of synchronization as publicly established with respect to a common clock and that of subjective simultaneity. Or to put it another way , the difference between you and me is information. So if the information on how my mind operates is put into a computer and then my body is destroyed my consciousness does not stop, if two phonographs are synchronized and playing the same symphony and you destroy one machine, the music does not stop. The fundamental question you have to ask yourself is; are we, our subjective existence, more like bricks or symphonies? Actually Hoyle's analogy would have been better if he put thoughts in those pigeon holes rather than events because you don't have thoughts you are thoughts. Subjectively, yes, I agree. But Hoyle actually makes this point explicitly. > > each 1-view is occupied serially and exclusively by the single agent: > i.e. *at one time and in one place*. Hence in that sense only a single > 1-view can possibly represent me *at that one time and that one place*. > I see no reason that must me true. Suppose all your life you had 2 brains in your head not one, the 2 brains were identical and always received identical information from your senses so they always agreed on how to operate your body. So perfect was the agreement that neither brain suspected the existence of the other. And then one day one of those brains was instantaneously stopped, what would be the result? Obviously a outside observer would notice no change in your behavior so objectively there would be no difference, and no thoughts would be interrupted so there would be no subjective change either. If stopping that brain makes no objective difference and it makes no subjective difference then it's safe to say it just makes no difference. I agree. But this is surely an example of what I say above: i.e. here we have a single view representing my subjective situation at one time and in one place. A difference which as you rightly say makes no difference is generally agreed to be no difference, isn't that so? In any case, even should we come up with an intelligible notion, unlike what you propose, for some species of perceptual orientation that differed significantly from my specification above (e.g. a single subjective view encompassing two times in two places??) I doubt that either of us would wish to cite it as typical of human experience. Also I don't think it makes much sense in saying your consciousness occupies a unique space. When you think about The Eiffel Tower is your subjectivity in France or is it in a bone box sitting on your shoulders? Again I agree. Hoyle's notion bears only on the subjective situation of his solipsistic and highly amnesic multiple personality and makes no stipulation as to physical location. He merely requires that subjective spatiotemporal location be consistent with physics understood in a broadly Everettian manner. In any case it's not meant as more than a possibly enlightening guide to thought. What is proposed is a particular conception of multiple subjective instances, whether conceived as mine, yours or those of a third party. It invites us to accept in principle the idea of our continued subjective existence in multiple versions (i.e. essentially consistent with the Everett interpretation) whilst equally appreciating that subjective compartmentalisation will generally make it appear as if we continue in only a single one of those versions. At the same time, and I personally think this is rather neat, it stops us from having to think in terms of the "simultaneous" though different conscious experiences of those "other versions", which generally strikes us as psychologically problematic. It achieves this by replacing the notion of "simultaneity" in this context by that of synchronization with respect to any suitable publicly sharable clock. So this leaves us free (in the common guise of Hoyle's wandering clerk and his pigeon holes) to occupy imaginatively each of these perspectives at the appropriate points in the serialisation without being disturbed by thoughts of the "simultaneous" experiences of our "other selves". And moreover should we be unable to avoid a suspicion that, given these considerations, even those others we regard as "not ourselves" are likewise not simultaneously conscious in this selfsame moment, we would do well to reflect that no possible public investigation could determine that they were. Indeed this stricture extends as far as any public examination of our very own brains! Anyway, that's the reason I thought a reminder of Hoyle's idea at this juncture might be helpful. I hope it may be. David John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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