On 22 January 2014 09:45, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think I said the fl;ashlight wasn't needed, so it isn't there, and so
> nothing moves it around. The pigeonholes stand for states of consciousness,
> so they perceive what it would illuminate, which is their own contents. But
> they can perceive those without it.
Do you really find that you can make intuitive sense of the pigeon hole
metaphor without the flashlight? I must admit I've never been able to. From
a 3p perspective, the idea is that the relations between pigeon holes map
out a multiplicity of implied spatial-temporal trajectories, "all there
together". From a 1p perspective this would seem to transform to a fixed
array of momentary points-of-view, again all there (or "illuminated")
together. I think that any attempt to intuit a relativised personal history
from this metaphor cannot avoid the imaginative association with one or
another *sequence* of pigeon holes. The logical alternative would seem to
be to get "stuck", monad-like, in whatever pigeon hole you first thought of.
What Hoyle was suggesting, I think, is that the necessary intuitions of a
"flow" of consciousness can all be collapsed, as it were, into the notion
of a *unique* sequence (in a purely logical sense) of randomly selected
pigeon holes. Such an "absolute" sequence must then contain all relativised
sequences, with their logical inter-relations and differential measures
preserved. Oddly enough, any notion of "flow", as entailing the observation
of transition between holes, is still unnecessary in this schema; indeed it
would be incoherent. The sequencing of pigeon holes carries no relation of
"next" or "previous"; the spatial-temporal structure of each pigeon hole is
already conceived as both "dynamic" and self-ordering, like Barbour's time
capsules.
Rather, the purpose of the logical sequence of pigeon holes - i.e. the beam
of the "flashlight" - is to furnish an intuition that avoids the
aforementioned "monadic catastrophe", by conceiving a unique multiplex of
all possible ("parallel") relative sequences. The cost of this heuristic is
that all the pigeon holes now belong to a sort of universal, solipsistic
multiple-personality that lives them (and, by proxy, "us") "one moment at a
time". It's an interesting idea, with more ramifications than might appear
at first blush, and thinking in this way often sheds an intriguingly
different light on the various thought experiments about identity and
succession we love to argue about on this list.
David
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