Re: Are First Person prime?

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 15:09:40 +0200

Le 11-août-06, à 18:50, David Nyman a écrit :

> I had an interesting exchange with Julian Barbour about this a while
> back. Originally I was convinced he was wrong that a time capsule was
> sufficient to produce the subjective experience of the passage of time.
> I called it a 'sleight of intuition' because all the time-related words
> we use simply *assume* such a passage and hence slip this sense in by
> the back door. He said a lot of people agreed with me, but his static
> concept of Platonia meant he was committed to his view actually being
> the case, without further arguments.
>
> However, I've changed my original view. I think the fact we don't
> experience consciousness 'smeared' or 'overlaid' over the 4th dimension
> is a function of memory, which delimits what information is available
> to be made conscious at any given point. This source of information is
> different in each (conscious) time capsule, and determines the
> boundaries of the view from that capsule. This is analogous to why we
> don't experience multiple versions in MWI, or in teleportation. The
> relevant question is always 'what information is available to me
> here?', where 'me' and 'here' are correlated within a discrete
> structure (time capsule).
>
> But why does the information in a time capsule *feels* dynamic rather
> than static? You will recall my view that qualia are the fact of
> *being* particular structures within primitive substance. Structure of
> course has a relational as well as a static aspect, and it may be that
> the 'feel' of the relational aspect is temporal. It's as if there were
> a dynamic figure/ ground tension between the substance instantiating
> the capsules and their unfolding, memory-delimited, structural
> sequence. Given that persons emerge experientially at the intersection
> of substance and structure, it's not impossible to intuit that the
> 'feel' of this dynamism is what we experience as the 'flow of time'.
> And the delimited nature of each step of the unfolding structure would
> be central to this. A 'totalised' view would arguably not be
> experienced as dynamic.
>
> David


OK. That's sum up what philosophers of science call sometimes the
indexical view of time. I think Sanders wrote papers on this.
Note that comp will lead toward a complete indexical view of most
physical notions. Not only time, but space as well, and even "energy",
etc.
This should suits "centrality of first person notion", but with comp,
as I try to explain, even that first person will emerge from more
primitive non personal notion (like numbers ...), and this
independently of the fact you like to recall and with which I agree
which is that I have only access to a personal view on numbers.

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Mon Aug 14 2006 - 09:11:49 PDT

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