On 9/27/2013 10:42 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 27 Sep 2013, at 04:50, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/26/2013 7:33 PM, LizR wrote:
On 27 September 2013 14:18, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 9/26/2013 6:47 PM, LizR wrote:
On 27 September 2013 13:03, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 9/26/2013 6:05 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
This is a sort of cul de sac experience, which has to be impossible to
create if QTI is true. The existence of a universal dovetailer entails
the lack of all cul de sac experiences (Comp immortality).
So does it make loss of consciousness impossible? ....under
anesthesia?...forever?
Surely not, because from a first person perspective one just goes to sleep
and
wakes up again (or experiences dreams). "No cul de sac" implies there's no
way to
stop consciousness permanently.
I know it implies that, but I see no reason to believe it. The question
isn't
whether consciousness continues, but whether *your* consciousness, a
particular
consciousness continues. To say otherwise is like saying you can't kill
the guy
in Moscow because he has a duplicate in Washington.
This is the "Haraclitus" problem (or observation, if you don't consider it a problem).
The man can't step into the same river because he isn't the same man. The
consciousness that continues after any given moment is, presumably, the next moment of
consciousness which is the "best continuation" of the last one. This seems similar to
the view in FOR that the multiverse is made of "snapshots" which give the appearance
of forming continuous histories (ignoring whether you can slice up space-time into
snapshots...)
But I think this is a confusion. Because computations have states and nothing
corresponding to transition times between states people are tempted to identify those
states with states of consciousness and make an analogy with frames of film in a movie
(hence 'the movie graph argument'). But there's a huge mismatch here. A conscious
thought has a lot of duration, I'd estimate around 0.02sec. The underlying computation
that sustains the quasi-classical brain at the quantum level has a time constant on the
order of the Planck time 10^-43sec. And even if it isn't the quantum level that's
relevant, it's obvious that most thinking is unconscious and a computer emulating your
brain would have to go through many billions or trillions of states to instantiate one
moment of consciousness. That means that at the fundamental level (of say the UD)
there can be huge overlap between one conscious thought and the next and so they can
form a chain, a stream of consciousness.
So there's a certain amount of "mini-death-and-mini-rebirth" going on every second in
the normal process of consciousness (in this view). Deciding what counts as a
continuation and what doesn't seems a bit ... problematic. (And of course there are
many continuations from any given moment.)
Not if there's nothing to overlap. Sure there is, by some measure, a closest next
continuation. But when you're eighty years old and fading out on the operating table,
it's going to be another eighty year old fading out on some other operating table. I
think someone has suggested that if you fade out completely then the next closest
continuation could be a newborn infant who is just 'fading in'. Which is a nice
thought - but is it you?
That happens each time you smoke salvia, you fade into your baby state (which makes you
look like a retard, which you are, in some sense, or, on higher dose, well beyond the
baby states (which actually knows already a lot, from the "beyond" perspective)). Then
you fade back into the actual "you", at least that is what you thought, but you can
doubt it also.
Deep enough (in the amnesia/disconnection) you can experience a consciousness state
which is experienced as time independent. Perhaps the consciousness of "all" simple
virgin universal machine/loop/numbers. It would be the roots of the consciousness flux;
the set of all universal numbers (a non recursively enumerable set).
So what do you suppose is the physical effect of salvia in your brain?
Brent
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