After very kindly concurring with bits of my recent posts, Bruno nonetheless quite reasonably questioned whether I followed his way of proceeding. Having read the UDA carefully, I would say that in a 'grandmotherly' way I do, although not remotely at his technical level. But I had been doing thought experiments of a somewhat similar nature literally for decades, based on questions like "why am I me and not you?" or "how do I know that me now is the same as me 5 minutes ago?" or "is the person who gets out of the transporter the same person as the one who began the journey?" For some time, faced largely with incomprehension or disinterest, and seeing hardly anything remotely like this referred to in print, I despaired of finding others who believed these questions were anything but irrelevant or crazy. But gradually these topics seemed to emerge into discussion from a variety of directions, and now I've found a community of similarly crazy people on the Internet.
The conclusion I had come to is broadly summarised in my recent posts. It seemed to me that the 'transporter' questions could only be resolved if I thought in terms of my being incorporated in some unique or 'global' pre-differentiated manner, which nonetheless multifariously self-localised by differentiation of structures that embodied distinct 'histories'. This seemed somehow to entail the emergence of finitude from the not-finite, which seemed weirdly right. Anyway, it would be the histories that differed, not the 'self'. The histories would break the symmetry of the self into differentiated sub-selves that would be 'I' with respect to their own private environments. These environments, being participatory, could only be shared with other such sub-selves by signalling', and the sum total of shareable signals, re-embodied, would be the 'objective' or 'outside' physical description of the situation. But since these 'entities' could only be self-defined emergents of the original self- relativisation, everything was in fact 'outside-less' and continued to exist uniquely or monistically as a network of self-relation. Depending on whether the participatory or 'objective' perspective was adopted, self-relation could apparently decompose into 'sense' or 'action' narratives, but such decomposition was in fact illusory, or perspective-dependent. Self-relation in fact remained singular or decomposable in nature Having said this, I can now perhaps contextualise more clearly my concern about functionalism. Functionalism is the doctrine that consciousness is a function of the relationship between parts. This entails that, discounting eliminativism, consciousness must be actualised by such relations, and that if such parts were to be considered 'ultimately' to be physical, then the relevant relations could only be physical relations. If this were so, the actual or realised relationships existent in a physical structure would be exhausted by its physical description, and the ascription of a super- added set of 'computational' relationships would merely be metaphorical and hence not real enough to be "I". Consequently, if physics is held to be fundamental to consciousness, and consciousness is an observer effect, then such observers must be fully describable by physical relationships, not functional ones, and the appropriate substitution level is physical duplication, to some level of tolerance. By contrast, if the reality of parts and relationships is to be considered fundamentally numerical, then consciousness and physics could indeed be derived functionally or computationally from this kit of parts and their relations. From this perspective, the physical structure of the body and the observational structure of the mind could be held to emerge respectively from 'action' and 'sense' decompositions of the fundamental self-relative nature of number- relations. Nonetheless, if the observer decomposition continues to be regarded as 'functional' with respect to the physical one, they remain in some deep sense orthogonal - i.e. the 'functionalism' is that of 'imaginary parts' and 'imaginary relations' with respect to the physical description. It follows that there may be no final way of 'de-crypting' any unambiguous observer structure from the physical description alone. We would then be left unavoidably with an 'objectively' unknowable and unprovable imputation of consciousness to any physically-defined structure. So be it. But it might then be questioned how observer and physical narratives could somehow 'converge' on a common or consistent environmental interface as a result of any form of co-evolution. Such a notion would seem to imply that equivalent selection effects could be operating on both environments despite their orthogonal orientation. It is not immediately apparent why this should be so. It may consequently offer some theoretical advantages to suppose that a single evolutionary path is followed as a consequence of one-to-one reciprocity at some level between sense and action components of a primitively self-relative narrative, and that consciousness is consequently not 'functional' with respect to the physical description, but in some real sense isomorphic or analogic. This would not, ISTM, be to postulate any fundamental 'material' substrate, but rather to be saying something about the way a 'neutral' fundamentally self-relative process could 'decompose' into apparently reciprocal components as a consequence of the embodiment of observation. However, I can't at this point see whether such alternatives can be resolved purely theoretically, or whether they are fundamentally empirical issues. Grandma --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
