Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> As for memory being encoded in or accessible to an OM, that is an unnecessary complication.
> As you said previously, the OM's are related solely by their information content. If the seconds
> of your life were sliced up, shuffled and thrown to the wind, (t1) 3:10:02 PM of 10/10/06 would
> still subjectively follow (t2) 3:10:01 PM of 10/10/06 even though there is no connection or "flow"
> of information between them. If you look at how t1 and t2 are generated, then yes, there is a
> connection - they both come out of your head - but once generated, they form a natural sequence
> which cannot be disrupted.
But my point about the 'coherence' of consciousness is that it seems
(especially from what occurs, or fails to occur, when it deteriorates)
that complex representation and processing of *temporally extended*
information sequences (e.g. grasp of the entirety of the content and
meaning of a sentence or proposition) is necessary for one to
experience and act as a fully-functioning conscious individual.
Consequently, it seems to me that such processes must converge on OMs
in which all the necessary information is fully encoded and expressed
(which is essentially what Barbour seems to be claiming for his 'time
capsules' - e.g. his 'flight of the kingfisher' example). Without this,
the alternative seems to be that the individual random, wind-blown
seconds of your metaphor would need to be totalised in some additional
non-information-based manner in order to coordinate an ensemble of
informationally incomplete, discrete elements into coherent
experiences. AFAICS they only 'form a natural sequence' from the
quasi-objective perspective of our philosophical stance. And such
coordination is in any case what we were assuring Peter was both
unnecessary and impossible.
The 'snapshot with memory' view of things is surely only viable if each
snapshot can be shown to be fully efficacious in reconstituting what we
do in fact experience - and this, short of magic, surely requires the
discrete presence within each snapshot of all the necessary process and
information. It seems to me that this might be a productive slant on
what work the brain might actually be doing in constructing the sort of
spatio-temporally dimensioned experiences we encounter. IOW, it isn't
just 'recording and replaying', but creating and continually updating a
coherent informational construct, centred on an embedded 'I', that
reads-out 'self-referentially' as a 4D world. Any given OM would
represent the state-of-update of this construct, with consequent full
access to its resources at that particular state-of-update.
David
> David Nyman writes:
> >
> > Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> >
> > > (b) can't be right. However many copies of you there are, you only experience being one at
> > > a time.
> >
> > Stathis, I concur with this view, and for the reasons you give.
> > However, much as I hate to complicate this issue further, I wonder if
> > you have a view on the following. I mentioned to Peter the issue of the
> > destructive effect of loss of short-term memory on the coherence of
> > 'normal' conscious processes - e.g. forgetting the beginning of a
> > sentence before getting to the end of it - an affliction to which I'm
> > not entirely a stranger myself! From this, it seems to me that the
> > notion of a 'state of consciousness' as being discrete with an OM, or
> > 'time-capsule', might be overly simplistic, unless we conceive of the
> > necessary extent of memory as being entirely encoded in, and accessible
> > to, an individual OM - i.e. an OM can represent a 'fully-conscious
> > individual'. For that matter, what temporal duration is an OM supposed
> > to encompass - a 'Planck-length' instant; the entire 'specious present?
> > This whole issue seems to be under-defined, but the danger is that the
> > very notion of 'the present' might need to be treated as an emergent
> > from a coordinated ensemble, rather than being inherent in individual
> > OMs. But then what would coordinate them?
> >
> > Any thoughts?
>
> It's certainly possible to have a very fragmented stream of consciousness. While
> fortunately rare these days, the most extreme forms of disorganised schizophrenia
> are from the patient's point of view something like having random, disconnected thoughts
> and perceptions without even a sense that they belong to a single enduring individual to
> bind them together.
>
> I think of an OM as the shortest possible period of conscious experience, which would make
> its apparent duration many milliseconds. Much of the discussion in which the term OM is used
> could as easily (and less ambiguously) use observer-second or observer-minute without loss
> of the general point. Of course, hours of real time physical activity might have to occur for
> each subjective moment of consciousness, and those hours may be divided up into infinitesimals
> in a block universe, or whatever the underlying physics dictates. The OM concept has analogies
> with block universe models, but it is philosophically useful regardless of what the actual nature
> of time is.
>
> As for memory being encoded in or accessible to an OM, that is an unnecessary complication.
> As you said previously, the OM's are related solely by their information content. If the seconds
> of your life were sliced up, shuffled and thrown to the wind, (t1) 3:10:02 PM of 10/10/06 would
> still subjectively follow (t2) 3:10:01 PM of 10/10/06 even though there is no connection or "flow"
> of information between them. If you look at how t1 and t2 are generated, then yes, there is a
> connection - they both come out of your head - but once generated, they form a natural sequence
> which cannot be disrupted.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Oct 26 2006 - 10:10:25 PDT