Re: Consciousness schmonscioisness

From: Jesse Mazer <lasermazer.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 08:19:30 -0500

"James Higgo (co.uk)" wrote:

>It's been almost two years you guys have been hung up on this 'I' nonsense
>-
>can't you conceive, for one moment, that there is no 'I'? Can you grasp the
>indisputable fact that this debate is meaningless if there is no 'I', just
>observer-moments without an 'observer'? Has anybody out there understood
>this point?

How does it make sense to talk about "observer-moments" if you don't believe
in consciousness? Those who don't believe in consciousness at all should
really just talk about the probability of various physical configurations,
computations, or something similar. But without consciousness you can't
incorporate the anthropic principle into your fundamental theory--no reason
to say some patterns/computations can be "experienced" while others can't.

However, for those who do believe in consciousness, it is still possible to
disbelieve in *continuity* of consciousness--there could just be a lot of
separate observer-moments that don't "become" anything different from what
they already are (so there'd be no point in asking which copy I'd become in
a replication experiment).

Jesse Mazer
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Received on Sat Feb 10 2001 - 05:21:32 PST

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