On 25 January 2014 09:21, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > Maybe the difference in intuition is because she doesn't think about it in > Hoyle's "universalist" way, although ISTM this is implicit in the heuristic > (i.e. the "guy" is the unique and non-simultaneous "owner" of the > experiences in all the pigeon holes). Without the flashlight, I think what > people do is think of themselves as situated in some pigeon hole or other > and then, as it were, imaginatively "select" some continuation sequence of > pigeon holes from there. > > > Yes. But we can still believe in the "universalist view", through the > amnesia and the return in the universal baby state, which then can be > related to the universal consciousness of the universal person. In that > sense we are right now the same person, but relatively amnesic of all > particularities which distinguish us. >
Yes indeed, it is the amnesia that "compartmentalises" us. But it's the "right now" that strikes me (and, I presume, struck Hoyle) as something of an an equivocation, at least in the pigeon hole analogy. I realise that "right now" is an intrinsically indexical concept and Hoyle quite definitely means us to understand that each co-existent pigeon hole in his 3p-block concept can indeed be interpreted as its own "right now", unchangingly. But he also sees that if he leaves it at that, he has not yet explicitly defined any principle that could suffice to break the unchanging symmetry of the co-existing block from the 1p perspective. In this bare scenario, each of us should rather expect our experience, if anything, to be permanently confined to that of a single pigeon hole "right now" - i.e. not momentarily, but unchangingly. And what would that be like? Not very much, it might seem. Consequently, he explicitly posits (and purely, I insist, as a sleight of intuition) an "unobservable change" - the replacement of one pigeon hole by another in the unique context of what must be understood, unequivocally, as a single, universal "right now". IOW, Hoyle's contention is that each moment of consciousness can be intuited as the singularised state of a universal solipsist whose successive re-combinations of remembering and forgetting suffice to break the panoptic symmetry. At the least, it seems possible that our experience (i.e. from the "inside") is *not inconsistent*with this intuition. It occurred to me, in passing, that this idea of unobservable but consequential change has some analogy (but no more than that) with the way our vision fixates successive points via "saccades" which are themselves unobserved. Despite the unobservability of any transition between visual fixations, we can hardly consistently believe that our gaze is merely confined to any one of them. The peculiar consequence of such an intuition is that, from the perspective of David's typing *these very words*, Julius Caesar is no more the owner of an experience "right now" than David continues to be the owner of the experience of a moment ago. The only experience that obtains "right now" is what "I" happen to be aware of, as a proxy for the universal solipsist to whom both "I" and "right now" are uniquely applicable. In this way, according to Hoyle, every moment of relative experience is lived out, in mutual exclusion, in due course and in due measure. I suppose, at least, we are asked to see that this multi-solipsistic intuition is no more open to experiential refutation than the mini-solipsism that is the butt of so many philosophical jokes ("Why are there so few of us solipsists?"). After all, from the perspective of the singular intersection of a universal "right now" with some element of a 3p-block, we should indeed expect to be confronted, in effect, with a "zombie world" devoid of directly-observable consciousness: and that is indeed consistent with (and the persistent puzzle of) our experience. But do we, in truth, live out every possible moment, "one at a time", in due course and in due measure? Well, somebody, on our behalf, does precisely this, do they not? However, after our many discussions, I suspect that Hoyle's universalist intuition (no doubt unsurprisingly) must be modified in the computationalist view and I think I am gradually starting to appreciate more and more what the differences may be. In fact I've been giving the matter a lot of thought recently. But that is meat for another conversation. In answer to your queries about Hoyle, I've no idea whether he met or knew about Everett, but he certainly considered the multiverse idea. Consider the following excerpt from "October the First is Too Late" (1965): "There could even be completely different universes. Go back to my decaying nucleus. Hook up a bomb which explodes according to whether you have decay of a nucleus or not. Make the bomb so big that it becomes a doomsday machine. Let it be capable - if exploded - of wiping out all life on the Earth. Let the whole thing go for a critical few seconds, you remember we were considering whether a nucleus would decay in a particular ten seconds? Do we all survive or don't we? My guess is that inevitably we appear to survive, because there is a division, the world divides into two, into two completely disparate stacks of pigeon holes. In one, a nucleus undergoes decay, explodes the bomb, and wipes us out. But the pigeon holes in that case never contain anything further about life on the Earth. So although those pigeon holes might be activated, there could never be any awareness that an explosion had taken place. In the other block, the Earth would be safe, our lives would continue - to put it in the usual phrase. Whenever the spotlight of consciousness hit those pigeon holes we should be aware of the Earth and we should decide the bomb had not exploded." Below is a link to some more quotes from the book. By the way I notice on re-reading that Hoyle has his protagonist hedge his bets somewhat on the possible significance of the "flashlight", but hey, it's fiction and science fiction at that! I hope Hoyle would have forgiven me for plagiarising and manipulating his idea for my own nefarious purposes! http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/hoyle.htm David David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. 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