A good point, Jacques. Dennett, whose opinion on this is widely respected,
agrees that the series of conscious instants is more like fleeting series of
moments of fame for a competing jumble of subsystems. Quite how much this
affects our discussions, I am not entirely sure.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jacques Bailhache [SMTP:Jacques.Bailhache.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: Thursday, July 08, 1999 2:52 PM
> To: 'David Seaman'; everything-list
> Subject: RE: Devil's advocate against Max Tegmark's hypothesis
>
>
> Are you sure that we have a continuous conscious experience ?
> Or have we a series of conscious instants, perceiving at each instant the
> content of our memory which contains a continuous record of the previous
> instants ?
>
> ==========================
> Jacques Bailhache
> Y2K Centre of Expertise (BRO)
> DTN: 856 ext. 7662
> Tel: +32-2 729.7662, Fax: +32-2 729.7985
> Email: mailto:jacques.bailhache.domain.name.hidden
> Visit my home page :
> http://www.webb.net/sites/log/
> http://www.chez.com/log/
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>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Seaman [mailto:drseaman.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: Thursday, July 08, 1999 12:10 PM
> To: everything-list
> Subject: Re: Devil's advocate against Max Tegmark's hypothesis
>
>
> At 23:36 -0400 7/7/99, Christopher Maloney wrote:
>
> >So the "flying rabbit" problem is just a restatement of the "why are
> >there physical laws" question, which has also been debated on this
> >list myriads of times.
>
> Here is my attempt at the physical laws question:
>
> Consider the set of all states of information which generate some
> continuous conscious experience. There are at least three disjoint
> subsets
> of this set :
>
> 1) States of information (SOI) which define a series of conscious
> 'instants' which when experienced one after the other generate a
> continuous
> conscious experience. There is a lot of information in these types of SOI
> since each instant requires a lot of information and it needs a lot of
> instants to generate a reasonable length of conscious experience.
>
> 2) SOIs which define an initial state consisting of a brain and supporting
> apparatus together with laws of physics which allow the brain to become
> conscious and remain conscious for a period of time. The initial state is
> complex and requires a lot of information but because the laws of physics
> are included there is a considerable saving over the information required
> for a type 2 SOI compared with type 1.
>
> 3) SOIs which define an initial state for a universe such as ours
> together
> with laws of physics which allow that universe to contain conscious
> entities. It is not clear whether a type 3 SOI contains more or less
> information than a type 2, but I suspect it takes less information to
> describe the boundary conditions for a universe than a brain.
>
> The amount of information an SOI contains is an indication of how unique
> that SOI in the set of all SOIs. If an SOI can be mutated and still
> generate conscious experiences then SOIs of that type will have greater
> measure in the set of all SOIs which generate conscious experiences. This
> means SOIs of type 1 require the most information so are the least general
> and would have least measure. And those of type 3 need less information
> are more general and would have higher measure. Another aspect of a type
> 3
> SOI is that it will typically generate many conscious entities which
> exist
> for considerable lengths of time (maybe infinite lengths of time). So
> when
> weighted by the number of conscious instants a type 3 SOI has a big
> advantage. This suggests it is most likely that a particular conscious
> experience will be generated by a type 3 SOI and will happen in a complete
> universe with physical laws.
>
>
>
Received on Thu Jul 08 1999 - 07:59:57 PDT