Dear David,
I have sorely missed your wisdom in this debate!
On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 1:06 PM, David Nyman <da...@davidnyman.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
I found a problem in Barbour's time capsules, the "monadic catastrophe",
exactly! Without an implicit before and after relation in the time capsules
they collapse into a singleton or become a chaos of 'everything is
connected to everything else' equally. Leibniz tried to avoid this by
having God compute the Best Possible World prior to the creation of the
Monads, but this is impossible. That computation is intractable. It is the
equivalent of computing the route of a traveling sales man that visits an
uncountable infinity of cities.
We need the Becoming that is implicit in the "moving flashlight", at
least to give us a window of finite duration in time (and bits/space) to
have a memory of "what I used to be" that can be compared to "what I
experience now".
>
> David
>
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--
Kindest Regards,
Stephen Paul King
Senior Researcher
Mobile: (864) 567-3099
stephe...@provensecure.com
http://www.provensecure.us/
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