Lee Corbin wrote:
> Stathis wrote, Friday, June 30, 2006 12:24 AM
>
>
>>A book is the analogy that came to mind, but there is an
>>important difference between this and conscious experience.
>>Books, sentences, words may not need to be physically
>>collected together to make a coherent larger structure,
>>but they do need to be somehow sorted in the mind of an
>>observer; otherwise, we could say that a dictionary
>>contains every book ever written or yet to be written.
>
>
> Okay, suppose that there are no observers, and the Earth
> has been burnt to a cinder except for one copy of Milton's
> "Paradise Lost", and one copy of the Oxford English dictionary.
> It seems to me that we should say that just two books still
> exist. Do you agree?
>
> (Sorry for asking what you have said many times one
> way or the other; I'm not clear as to who has said
> what.)
>
> Supposing that you do agree that these two book in our
> spacetime still exist, then as you have said, all the
> words in "Paradise Lost" can be found in the Oxford
> dictionary.
>
> Next we begin the slippery slope argument where Paradise Lost
> is broken apart into its separate pages and scattered
> throughout the cosmos. I agree with you that in one sense
> Milton's book no longer exists, but it still does exist in
> the sense that there is enough redundancy to piece it back
> together again were a new sentient life form to come into
> being, and to find those pages, and to bind them.
>
> What I disagree with is your statement that the mind of the
> observer really played any key role.
I find that implausible. You're assuming that the pages could be put back in order without
recognizing any meaning of the words. Do you think you could put the pages of a book written in
Chinese in order? - I couldn't. I think you are implicitly assuming that rules of syntax and
grammar are in the text itself. For a long book, it might be possible to infer those rules with
some confidence - but not with certainty.
As this analogizes OMs, my conception of OMs is that they would correspond roughly to sentences, not
pages; so reconstruction is even less likely.
Brent Meeker
"A solopist is like the man who gave up turning around because whatever he saw was always in front
of him."
--- Ernst Mach
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Received on Sun Jul 02 2006 - 15:11:05 PDT