On 29 Jul 2009, at 16:09, David Nyman wrote:
>
> 2009/7/28 Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>:
>
>> Now, the question "why this 1-OM and not that other one", is like the
>> questions:
>> - "why do I feel myself in W, and not in M" which is very natural
>> for the
>> one going out at W.
>> - "why do I feel myself in M, and not in W" which is very natural
>> for the
>> one going out at M.
>> OK?
>
> Yes, OK, the seven steps: but this isn't the problem. Hmm...let's
> see. OK, let's try a different tack. As you have observed, we may
> well share some basic intuitions, but we don't share the same goal
> here. Yours intentions vis-a-vis COMP are professional, precisely
> limited, modest, practical, and as such I endorse them wholeheartedly.
> Mine are dilettantish, more personally oriented, probably less
> useful; essentially a way of exercising my curiosity. So before going
> on, I need to state something obvious, or perhaps not-so-obvious,
> related to my personal thinking style.
>
> In internalising your ideas, I try to do so, as it were, by BECOMING
> whatever system you are proposing. You might say that this is
> reification, but for me it's an indispensable imaginative tool: you
> might call it cogification. It's a sort of meditation, and when I was
> active as a programmer, I used to be able to do it in my dreams, and
> would often actually experience myself as the program going into some
> error state - a useful debugging tool! And of course one of the
> helpful aspects of cogifying in this way is that you see immediately
> what you're getting, what you're NOT getting, and particularly that
> you can't get something for nothing.
>
> So all my questions to you really stem from these imaginative
> cogifications. I need to know what it FEELS like to be in
> Bruno-world. Only then can I find out if it matches my own
> experience, and hence the non-negotiable appearances I'm committed to
> saving. Thus in the present case, I first scrupulously clearing away
> extraneous notions, and commence to cogify myself to your
> specifications in order to experience the consequences. As a simple
> result of my going about the matter in this way I am totally present
> and personally instantiated in my cogifications. My natural
> perspective here is that of the One - the global "I": hence all my
> questions stem from this perspective.
>
> Now, it impinges on me that I really should justify how the One could
> be said to 'focus' itself on - or resolve - a COMP perspective in the
> first place: i.e. we must check that what I airily called 'clearing
> away extraneous notions' isn't just getting something for nothing.
> Actually, 'something *from* nothing' may turn out to be more apt here:
> mathematical totality - in effect
> everything-inter-related-in-every-possible-way - would be
> indistinguishable, from the perspective of the One, from 'nothing'.
> This has been pointed out in various ways before. So the first
> cogification is (in David Bohm's term) the 'relevation' (relative
> elevation) of the number realm and its basic operators: the emergence
> of something from nothing. A point of view, or the possibility of
> many, emerges. In effect, everything else falls away into background
> noise.
>
> Further cogifications are then further levels of relevation: that of
> the UD and its infinitely iterated interlaced infinities of steps
> distinguished from the background noise of the set of all possible
> programs. As I cogify myself in the guise of the UD I'm able to
> consider the relevation of further subsets of the global point of
> view. Now "I" - as the One - can see interference effects relevate
> invariances from the background noise of recursive infinities;
> increasingly intricate patterns built on these invariances;
> pattern-pattern 'least difference' relations that both create and
> differentiate historical sequences; 'events in time' that relevate as
> these sequences phase-shift through my global 'observer moment'; white
> rabbits that flit by, but get lost against the vast illumination of
> reiterated regularity. In this broad-brushed but experientially
> persuasive way I'm able to intuit how "I" - as the One - might both
> lose and find myself in an infinity of distinguishable personal
> regularities against a background of noisy irrelevance.
>
> So my question to you was really about the machinery of perspective,
> in the sense I've described above. We often speak of the
> indeterminacy of the "I", but I'm at least equally struck by its
> determinacy. It's always the same "I", and this is consequent on the
> global presence of the One in the light of the options available for
> relevating a point of view. As a direct consequence of cogifying
> myself in the form of the One, I perceive that I really have two
> options only, experientially speaking. I can just sit here
> atemporally; present, differentiated and inter-related in all possible
> ways, but essentially getting 'nothing' out of it. Or I can relevate
> a global observer moment and thus experience a polymorphous parade of
> events phase-shifting through it as inter-laced personal histories in
> space and time. It may be all illusory, but at least they're MY
> illusions: the mini-illusions of the vast cavalcade of mini-mes.
> Which option is likely to be the more entertaining way of spending
> eternity?
Gosh, David, you are a champion for the difficult questions.
I like to compare the effect of understanding UDA with the effect of
smoking Salvia Divinorum. When I was young I was sure that
understanding UDA-like reasoning and paradoxical thought experiment,
was only a source of joy, for everyone.
But life taught me that this was not so obvious.
The reaction to UDA, by the few people who get the ultimate "AH AH"
has been a shock for me. A computer scientist in France told me he
lost sleep for one week. It is the same with salvia divinorum. If you
look at the reports, you will often see similar reports with very
different conclusions; like two quasi-same reports but one ending by
"this was the biggest joyful revelation in my life", and the other
ending by "this was the worst terrible moment in my life".
I have learned to hide, in all matter, my enthusiasm, not always with
success actually.
So, about the more entertaining way of spending eternity, I would just
say: try heaven, avoid hell, but don't count on any body or tierce
soul to give you a path, or a definition, this is really *your* job.
No two souls can find the same things entertaining.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Wed Jul 29 2009 - 18:32:06 PDT