On 09 Jun 2012, at 15:42, David Nyman wrote:
On 9 June 2012 11:17, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
Such a backtracking (proposed once by Saibal Mitra on this list)
can also be
used to defend the idea that there is only one person, and that
personal
identity is a relative "illusory" notion. We might be a "God"
playing a
trick to himself, notably by becoming amnesic on who and what he is.
We seem to agree on this, at least some of the time! If we entertain
such notions, the question then presents itself - assuming one doesn't
accept, with Hoyle, that this similarly entails "only one" multiplexed
stream of consciousness - how "only one person" can be conceived as
being the subject of every experience "simultaneously"?
Probably because the experience of consciousness itself is not
temporal. But from each fist person picture, as everything physical
become an indexical (technically defined with the logic of self-
reference) we get deluded in both personal identity (I),present moment
(now), and present place (here). The same person get the "illusion" of
being different person at different times and in different places, but
those are the things which depends only on the atemporal relations
between relative universal numbers states (assuming comp). Just that
as seen from the (arithmetically, atemporally) implemented *knower*
(first person) it looks physically and temporally structured, as the
machine might already tell us, in the case of the ideally self-
refetentially correct machine.
I am not sure I understand your problem with that simultaneity. The
arithmetical relations are out of time. It would not make sense to say
that they are simultaneously true, because this refer to some "time",
and can only be used as a metaphor.
Think perhaps to the WM duplication with delay: it shows notably that
the "subjective" time is not connected causally to the "physical
time" (assuming one), the belief in a past of a subject is an
arithmetical construction, and it makes sense, quasi-tautologically,
along the computations which "satisfies or not" the beliefs.
The universal person might be the knower associated to any universal
machine, or any sigma_1 complete believer (provably equivalent with
respect of computability).
If you recognize yourself in that person, your are "obviously
immortal". Here, it would be like accepting a 8K computer for the
brain, leading to a version of yourself *quite* amnesic. But again
that 8K and bigger system but equivalent, or extending them, pullulate
in arithmetic. Consciousness' differentiation seems unavoidable there
too. Does this put some light on the question?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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