Re: Everything Physical is based on Consciousness - A question

From: Hal Ruhl <HalRuhl.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 08 May 2005 15:54:08 -0400

Hi Jeanne:

It is much the same thing. More or less the first person is the one
standing in Bruno's transporter and the third person is the one operating it.

Several years ago I started a FAQ for this list but lacked the necessary
time to finish.

Hal Ruhl


At 02:54 PM 5/8/2005, you wrote:
> I am a mere layperson who follows your discussions with great
> interest, so forgive me if I'm about to ask a question whose answer is
> apparent to all but me. I am very familiar with the "first person" and
> "third person" concept in everyday life and literature, but I am a little
> unclear about the specific meaning that it holds in these discussions; I
> feel like I'm missing something important that is blocking my
> understanding of how you are applying first and third person to your work
> in terms of multiverses and MWI. Could someone please direct me to some
> links that could help me better understand these perspectives as they
> apply to the discussions. Thank you.
>
>Jeanne
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <mailto:stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>Stephen Paul King
>To: <mailto:everything-list.domain.name.hidden>everything-list.domain.name.hidden
>Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2005 11:35 AM
>Subject: Re: Everything Physical is based on Consciousness
>
>Dear Norman,
>
> You make a very interesting point (the first point) and I think that
> we could all agree upon it as it is but I notice that you used two words
> that put a sizable dent in the COMP idea: "snapshot" and "precisely
> represented". It seems that we might all agree that we would be hard
> pressed to find any evidence at all in a single snapshot on an entity to
> lead us to believe that it somehow has or had some form of 1st person
> viewpoint, a "subjective" experience.
> Even if we were presented with many snapshots, portraits of "moments
> frozen in time" like so many insects in amber, we would do no better; but
> we have to deal with the same criticism that eventually brought
> Skinnerian behaviorism down: models that only access a 3rd person view
> and disallow for a "person" making the 3rd person view will, when
> examined critically, fail to offer any explanation of even an illusion of
> a 1st person viewpoint! And we have not even dealt with the Representable
> by "string-of-zeroes-and-ones" .
>
> Bitstring representability only gives us a means to asks questions
> like: is it possible to recreate a 3rd person view. Examples that such
> are possible are easy to find, go to your nearest Blockbuster and rent a
> DVD... But again, unless we include the fact that we each, as
> individuals, have some 1st person view that somehow can not be known by
> others without also converging the 1st person viewpoints of all involved,
> we are missing the obvious. A "representation of X" is not necessarily
> 3rd person identical to X even though it might be 1st person
> indistinguishable!
>
> About the multiverse being infinite in space-time: You seem to be
> thinking of space-time as some kind of a priori existing container, like
> a fish bowl, wherein all universes "exists", using the word "exists" as
> if it denoted "being there" and not "somewhere else". This is
> inconsistent with accepted GR and QM in so many ways! GR does not allow
> us to think off space-time as some passive "fishbowl"! Space-time is
> something that can be changed - by changing the distributions of
> momentum-energy - and that the alterable metrics of space-time can change
> the distributions of momentum-energy - otherwise known as "matter" -
> stuff that makes up planets, people, amoeba, etc.
> QM, as interpreted by Everrett et al tells us that each eigenstate(?)
> of a QM system is "separate" from all others, considered as representing
> entirely separate distributions of matter/momentum-energy, and thus have
> entirely different and unmixed space-times associated. The word
> "parallel" as used in MWI should really be "orthogonal" since that is a
> more accurate description of the relationships that the Many Worlds have
> with each other.
>
> Now, what are we to make of these two statements taken together? I
> don't know yet. ;-)
>
>Stephen
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <mailto:ncsamish.domain.name.hidden>Norman Samish
>To: <mailto:everything-list.domain.name.hidden>everything-list.domain.name.hidden
>Cc: <mailto:everything-list.domain.name.hidden>everything-list.domain.name.hidden
>Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2005 3:14 AM
>Subject: Everything Physical is based on Consciousness
>Gentlemen,
>I think that we all must be "zombies who behave as if they are conscious,"
>in the sense that a snapshot of any of us could, in principle, be precisely
>represented by a string of zeroes and ones.
>If it is true that the multiverse is infinite in space-time, is it not true
>that anything that can exist must exist? If so, then, in infinite
>space-time, there are no possible universes that do not exist.
>Norman Samish
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Stathis Papaioannou"
><<mailto:stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>
>To: <<mailto:stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
>Cc: <<mailto:everything-list.domain.name.hidden>everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
>Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 10:47 PM
>Subject: Re: Everything Physical is Based on Consciousness
>
>Dear Stephen,
>COMP is basically a variant of the familiar "Problem of Other Minds", which
>is not just philosophical esoterica but something we have to deal with in
>everyday life. How do you know that all your friends and family are really
>conscious in the way you are conscious, and not merely zombies who behave as
>if they are conscious? There isn't any empirical test that can help you
>decide the answer to this question conclusively; in the final analysis, you
>assume that other people have minds as a matter of faith. This troubles me
>as much as it troubles you, but alas, there is nothing we can do about it.
>--Stathis Papaioannou
Received on Sun May 08 2005 - 15:57:31 PDT