On Wed, Nov 13, 2024 at 06:35:14PM -0800, PGC wrote:
>   
> It's been quite some time and my notes/books are still in the basement after a
> move, so I'll go from memory and try informally. Computationalist setting as
> we've discussed for years, UDA, weak arithmetic realism, universality,
> computation, yad yada yada. Yes, this will be informal and lack precision +
> definitions. Consult the literature as I won't be making that kind of sense. 
> At
> your own peril, with typos and all: 
> 

....

Impressive summary of Bruno Marchal's work, but I'm not going to
comment on any of that here.


>  
> 
> 
> 
>     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,
> 
> 
> How so? The self in the above sense and setting can be seen as the entire
> universe (of mind, lol), admitting and weakening the statement by asserting
> that this includes a component beyond our capacity to define.

The self experienced as the entire universe is rather different to
experiencing no self at all. I have experienced the former in TM, but
never the latter.

The Occam catastrophe argument is that if you do not experience the
self, there is nothing to anchor your experience to our rich universe,
and you will instead experience the multiverse as a whole. Such an
experience would be rather simple, if not a non-experience
altogether. Indeed, there is some evidence from sensory deprivation
experiments (aka flotation tanks) that this does happen.

> I have no idea
> what Bruno experiences. But I do remember reading some first person diaries
> from student days. Various dissociatives and psychedelics behave similarly to
> Salvia according to these. Some student saw their field of view collapse into
> beholding the multiverse at a single moment timelessly for a few minutes,
> according to their companions; uterring: "You gotta be fuckin kidding me." at
> the end of it.
>

Bear in mind, I haven't read Metzinger's book yet - just some of the
reviews. I don't know what is actually being claimed.

> By the way, how are the corals doing and are you still diving, Russell? Is
> there some healing or everything getting more and more bleached? 
>

I live about 2000 km from the Great Barrier Reef. I understand the
bleaching is pretty bad, but haven't visited that area for about 20
years, so I can't say first hand. The way things are going, we might
start getting coral growing off our coast instead.

I haven't dived for about 3 years - just been too freaking busy to get
my gear fixed after it broke down. It doesn't help that my local dive
shop closed down just after the pandemic, so have to go further afield
for gear repairs and tank fills.


-- 

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Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders     [email protected]
                      http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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