At 03:44 PM 6/26/2005, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Dear Richard,
Let me follow up on your suggestion: Assuming a "personality" is made
up of multiple modules,does it necessarily follow that a "hidden
observer" exist as a seperate entiry, or could it be that the usual
single personality results from an entrainment (the modules become like
oscillators that couple to each other) over the many modules?
Hilgard asked the "entity" that question more than a few times. The hidden
observer came across as quite normal-sounding. reasonable and real. A
Finnish psychologist by the name of Reima Kampmann made an extensive study
of the phenomenon, but unfortunately published little--and what he did
publish was never translated to any languages other than Finnish. Bottom
line: The hidden observer seems to be as real as such entities can be--or
perhaps as real as some of the better business CEOs. Certainly better than
some of the former CEOs in the news lately. Otherwise, it appears that the
hidden observer phenom has not been studied in depth. I haven't seen much
published research.
This idea predicts that if this entrainment mode is unstable and there
are other possible metastale entrainment modes possible, then the
personality that emerges is unstable; we get the symptons of
multiple-personality disorder that makes "personalities" analogous to the
metastable (phase space) orbits of a chaotic system.
If no stable or metastable entrainments between the multiple modules
obtain, we have the symptoms of autism. No?
Autism supposedly has been associated with structural changes based upon CT
cans. Beyond that I don't know enough about autism to comment. Ornstein
suggests that multiple-personalities are rather normal. On the other hand,
there are some great books out there about this complex and weird
phenom. For those who think the brain is just a complex radio set,
multiple personality disorder can be thought of as merely having a crummy
tuner (coil?) or a bad antenna. Melvin Morse, a Seattle pediatrician
suggested that there is an antenna of a sort--and it's located in the right
temporal sulcus. According to his books, this area also serves as some
sort of ejection seat for the soul. I wrote a novel a few years ago that
hypothesized a specific EEG signal emanating from this area (resolved using
a standard Fast Fourier Transform circuit.) By monitoring the wavelet
coming from this area, one could determine the time of exit for an OOBE.
Rich M
Kindest regards,
Stephen
- Original Message - From: "rmiller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Norman Samish" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 3:58 PM
Subject: Re: Have all possible events occurred?
At 10:22 AM 6/26/2005, Norman Samish wrote:
"Stathis Papaioannou" writes: Of course you are right: there is no way to
distinguish the original from the copy, given that the copying process works
as intended. And if you believe that everything possible exists, then there
will always be at least one version of you who will definitely experience
whatever outcome you are leaving to chance. Probability is just a first
person experience of a universe which is in fact completely deterministic,
because we cannot access the parallel worlds where our copies live, and
because even if we could, we can only experience being one person at a time.
RM Comments: (1) I'll have to disagree with Stathis' (apparent) statement
that "probability is just a first person experience of a universe."
No proper foundation. (2) Additionally, Stathis assumes that we cannot
access the parallel worlds where our copies live. Since no one
can even define consciousness, or isolate precisely where memory is
located (or even what it is), there is no way we can preclude simultaneous
experience. The best we can say is, "we simply don't know." And, (3),
for the same reasons, we cannot say that we "experience being one person
at a time." There are numerous psychological models---neodissociationism
being just one---that posit a personality made up of multiple modules,
all interacting (somewhat) under the guidance of an executive, Hilgard's
"hidden observer." Unless and until we fully understand how
consciousness is linked to personality, we probably shouldn't preclude
multiple or simultaneous experience.
