On 15 Aug 2017, at 12:08, 'scerir' via Everything List wrote:
Spudboy100:
One consciousness, yourself, of with everyone else, spanning other
Everett Universes?
"The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met
nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated
in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is
identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as
a part of it. But, of course, here we knock against the arithmetical
paradox; there appears to be a great multitude of these conscious
egos, the world is however only one.
There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of
minds or consciousnesses, Their multiplicity is only apparent, in
truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads.
The doctrine of identity can claim that it is clinched by the
empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the
plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever
experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace
of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the
world.
Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I should say: the
over-all number of minds is just one. I venture to call it
indesctructible since it has a peculiar time-table, namely mind is
always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is
only now that includes memories and expectations. But I grant that
our language is not adequate to express this, and I also grant,
should anyone wish to state it, that I am now talking religion, not
science – a religion, however not opposed to science, but supported
by what disinterested scientific research has brought to the fore."
Erwin Schrödinger, in Mind and Matter, ch. 4, Oneness of Mind
Schroedinger's text is lovely, but from it you can doubt that he would
have appreciated Everett and Mechanism. He is right that the
"mind" (and he meant here "the soul") is a "singulare tantum", and I
bet he is right saying that there is only one mind (indeed, it is the
mind of the universal person that all Löbian machine have).
He is "very right" when he says that "The doctrine of identity can
claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is
never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has
none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is
also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening
anywhere in the world." That justifies the FPI, and the disjunction of
the conscious experiences of the duplicated persons.
Is he right to identify the ego with the world picture? Let us ask G.
G remains silent ... until given a counter-example using mechanism.
Let us ask G*. G* explains that it is false for the machine, but that
it is true for God, which explains the preliminary silence of the
machine. The ego is given by Bp, and the physical world by (Bp & Dp &
p), on p sigma_1. They obey quite different logic (self-reference for
Bp, and quantum logic for Bp & Dp & p). So what?
So he is "wrong" when asserting that the multitude of mind is opposed
to the unicity of the world. He is correct that there is one mind and
one reality, but that reality is not physical, and the multiplicity of
mind is an illusion, and the multiplicity of worlds too, but that is
the "physical illusion" which is quite real as we all know and can
derive from Arithmetic.
So, although the Upanishad are very close to the universal machine
intrinsic neopythagoreanism, I suspect Schroedinger to use it to avoid
digging deeper on both the mind body problem and the problem of
interpreting the quantum facts. That happens naturally when you
separate religion and science. Religion becomes a pretext to stop the
thinking. He would have taken the Upanishad much more seriously, he
would have understood that his cat was quite possibly simultaneously
alive and death, and he would have found the theory of Everett, but
here we see that he missed it badly, for simple lack of rigor in
religion/theology. Like many, it seems he would not have licked
Mechanism, and probably would have opposed it to the Upanishad,
incorrectly. (I guess a bit of this from the reading of the whole book
by Schroedinger, not just this excerpt).
Oneness of Mind? OK
Oneness of Reality? OK
Oneness of Person? Hmm... still OK
Oneness of people (ego) and cosmos? Not OK. (and science has to
explain that non-oneness).
Best,
Bruno
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