On 4/19/2017 6:42 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 20 Apr 2017 12:57 a.m., "John Clark" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 6:56 AM, David Nyman <[email protected]
<mailto:[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
That I don't understand. Who is wandering and why does there need to be
a wanderer or an agent. Isn't the moving light the indicator of
experience being realized? But why does it need to be "realized". If
it's a thought or experience it doesn't need "realizing". If it's not,
how does indicating it with a light make any difference?
Brent
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
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