The Elephant and the Blind, by Thomas Metzinger. 500+ experiential reports on the nature of consciousness.
I was wondering if anybody has read this, and has an opinion. Surprisingly, the book is actually open access, so you can download a free PDF from the MIT Press website to browse at your leisure, which I will in due course. The reason I ask is that in my book I make a number of conclusions, based on taking the everthing idea seriously, inckuding: 1) That consciousness necessarily requires an awareness of self. This comes about from a resolution of the "Occam Catastrophe" (my term), which is an argument I made from considering the everything idea, coupled with Occams razor theorems. It is loosely based on an earlier argument by David Deutsch, considering virtual reality environments. 2) That consciousness necessarily requires an experience of the passing of time. This latter is more crystallised by the notion of computationalism, which requires time in order for a computation to happen - but seriously I cannot see how you can measure the difference between two things without a time dimension in which to bring the two things together, and difference is fundamental to the botion of bit, and information theory generally. In Metzinger's book, he presents evidence from trascendental meditation that the self is a kind of illusion that can disappear in certain conscious states, and that it is possible to experience timeless consious states. Now I have practiced TM occasionally in my life, and I can attest to the dissolution of the self-other boundary - but in that case it was a sense that the self expended to encompass the entire universe, nit that the self disapperaed. I have never experienced a timeless state, though. I seem to remember that Bruno Marchal claimed once that smoking salvia could induce these states states, so I might ask him personally what he thinks of that book. I don't want to mince words here - taken on face value, these claims present evidence directly contradicting the many worlds interpretation of QM, and so are in the words of Arthur C Clarke "extraordinary evidence". Of course, it is entirely possible that my arguments contain a fatal flaw (hopefully of the interesting kind), or that I am somehow misinterpreting what his claims are. Just putting this out here to see what people think of this book, and the possibly challenge to the everything idea. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders [email protected] http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/ZzFRYDhy-RXSMdGI%40zen.
