On 10/30/2013 3:24 PM, LizR wrote:
On 31 October 2013 10:50, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>>
wrote:
On 10/30/2013 11:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
and that personal survival from moment to moment is exactly the same as
survival
during a duplication experiment. In comp, at least, a person is a series of
discrete states, a "Capsule theory" of memory and identity
I find that theory lacking. It is usually expressed as a sequence of
"observer
moments" with the implication that the moment consists of a state of
consciousness
and that this state belongs to sequences according to its inherent content.
But how
finely divided can these moments be? If they are very fine then they
haven't enough
content to provide specific linkage to other moments and a given OM will
fit in
infinitely many sequences, including circular ones - so the theory
effectively fails
to identify any person at all.
So suppose the OM are 'longer'; then they are not 'moments' and they can be
connected by overlapping rather than by some 'inherent' content. This is
essentially Bertrand Russell's theory of time.
Or suppose that even though they are short, so that there is no 'overlap',
they have
a lot of content that allows them to form specific enough sequences to be
considered
persons, e.g. memories. But that is inconsistent with them being
*conscious*
moments - what one is conscious of is (a) not momentary and (b) doesn't
usually
include conscious memories. This problem can be avoided by supposing that
the OM is
more than just the observer's conscious thought, but rather a 'capsule' as
envisioned by Julian Barbour. But that effectively brings back physics and
the
brain as the extra information carried along with conscious thought.
I think the point here is that IF consciousness is Turing-emulable, THEN it can be
split up into discrete sequential states, which we can call OMs for convenience, even
though they may in practice be far shorter than anything we'd recognise as a moment
(e.g. they could be one Planck time long). Since comp assumes consciousness is TE, OMs
must exist in comp. The question is whether this premise of comp is correct (at any level).
Yes, that's like the last I considered. There's a lot lower level under consciousness
which I think corresponds to "physics" in some general sense as a layer between UD
arithmetic and conscious thoughts.
Brent
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