Le 03-déc.-05, à 11:12, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
> Bruno Marchal writes:
>
>> Le 01-déc.-05, à 07:17, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
>>
>>> Why does an OM need to contain so much information to link it to
>>> other OMs making up a person? [the complete message is below].
>>
>>
>> I am not sure I understand. Are you saying, like Saibal Mitra, that
>> OMs (Observer-Moments) are not related? How, in this case, would you
>> interpret your own talk about "next observer moment" (those which
>> could be dead end)?
>> Is there not a confusion between the idea of physicalist (causal)
>> view of the relation between OMs (which, as Brent meeker said should
>> be explained from a more primitive (mathematical, immaterial, not
>> causal, ...) notion of OM, with those very (more primitive) OMs.
>> Are you assuming some notion of multiverse richer than (or just
>> different from) a notion of multi-OMs?
>
> In our ordinary experience, the OMs making up an individual's stream
> of consciousness are causally related by virtue of the fact that that
> they occur inside the same brain. If we consider thought experiments
> involving teleportation or mind uploading, again the sequential OMs
> are causally related due to transfer of the relevant brain pattern (or
> whatever) information. However, this information tranfer is not
> actually *necessary* for the OMs to be experienced as moments in the
> same stream of consciousness. Say an observer experiencing OM a1
> enters a teleporter which then causes another observer experiencing OM
> a2 to be created at the receiving station. Then a1 and a2 are
> sequential OMs, constituting a stream of consciousness a1a2 sampled
> from the life of an individual. If this is so, then if a1 occurs
> anywhere in the multiverse, and a2 occurs anywhere else, the same
> stream of consciousness a1a2 should be experienced - even if a1 and a2
> occur completely at random, with no "causal link" between them.
No causal link. OK. But there is an arithmetical or
computer-science-theoretical link. This includes memories, consistency
conditions, etc.
>
> I am agnostic regarding the question of whether OMs are primitive or
> derivative. The world could be as it appears: the physical universe
> (whatever that means) gives rise to certain special physical processes
> which result in moments of conscious experience, and those moments
> which are related through being the product of circumscribed subsets
> of physical processes constitute a stream of consciousness in an
> individual life. On the other hand, in a world where exactly the same
> OMs as postulated in the previous sentence exist, but all mixed up and
> not connected to any (or any particular) physical process, exactly the
> same individual streams of consciousness would result.
OK. So why ever postulate a physical world, given that the OMs you
describe already exist independently of us (in arithmetical platonia),
and that nobody has ever succeed in explaining what a primitive
physical world could be, and that nobody has ever succeed in relating
OMs as lived by people and some putative concrete substantial reality?
I think that with OCCAM, any notion of computationalist OMs, makes the
idea of a ontologically primitive physical multiverse useless. (and the
Olympia/movie-graph makes it senseless, but here I would say that
remark is off-topic).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Wed Dec 07 2005 - 08:29:30 PST