On Thursday, November 14, 2024 at 4:01:20 AM UTC+1 Russell Standish wrote:
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. Appreciating the sentiment; it's not really a summary of Bruno's work. It's an attempt to clarify that the forward arrow of time in those settings has a degree of rigorous confirmation in the field of mathematical self-reference and logic, without becoming too technical + exhaustively defining everything, throwing out reading lists and illustrating the heavy lifting that's already been done with precision. That'd be real work. :) It's oversimplified but the assumption of a forward flow of time is not without justification/merit in the UDA protocol and setting, which I tried to make more accessible because of the frequent "But we need time. What is consciousness? It seems to require time?" sort of statements that frequently pop up. > > > > > 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. Too unclear for me. This is already captured by (◊t∨t) in a UDA setting. That does the anchoring via all the usual definitions and illustrates the obviousness and simplicity aspect of consciousness. Clarity on non-experience may help. > 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. I've read earlier writings and skimmed through some of this. While appearing organized and rigorous on the surface, I see him violating Occam many times besides conflating physical notions with immaterial metaphysical one all the time. E.g. for the Suchness chapter, where I kind of had an immediate hunch that he'd do this: *I have already offered a phenomenological reinterpretation of “emptiness” as “epistemic openness.” One prediction would be that in all situations in which subject/ object structure fades away, “emptiness” and “epistemic openness” will be properties not only of the conscious mind, but also of what were previously taken to be inanimate perceptual objects. Suchness then becomes the emptiness of appearances in the more precise sense of their being epistemically open, for example in terms of lacking a predetermined conceptual essence. * Taking such liberties, you can say anything. Closer to poetry/fiction/personal opinion. > 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. Pretty bad could mean a lot. Are there still areas where things remain close to not being affected; e.g. places with a lot of open ocean current? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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