This is a textbook case of what Eliezer calls
"worshipping a sacred mystery". People tend to act
like a theoretical problem is some kind of God,
something above them in the social order, and since
it's beaten others before you it would be wise to pay
due deference to it. Of course, a theoretical problem
doesn't care how many times you attack it, and we have
proven as a species that we can understand things that
are much more grandiose than we are (eg, General
Relativity). By all means ask for an explanation and
hard evidence if someone claims to have solved an open
problem, to weed out the cranks, but simply declaring
that it is "pretentious" to even attempt to understand
something is not going to get anyone anywhere.
Im sorry that sounded that way. I rather meant that it was pretentious to
believe one understands it, rather than attempting to. In fact,
consciousness is something Ive spent to much thinking about, and though
Ive discovered many new possible aspects of consciousness, rather than
coming any closer to understanding its very essence I only came to the
conclusion that it was probably impossible to do so.
Perhaps consciousness doesnt have any explanation at all. The same may
apply to other things, after all. Motion may be an example thereof: it seems
impossible to explain it by any mechanism, as the interactions it would
involve would inevitably entail motion themselves.
That said, I do not understand how this mysterious
thing called "subjective experience" works myself, and
as of right now I am not even going to try, because it
is liable to go around in centuries-old philosophical
fruit loops that go nowhere.
I suppose Im somewhat digressing from the original subject, as you were
discussing futurology rather than metaphysics, so Ill stop my rambling
after this post: the length of my posts has escalated from a few sentences
to a few pages. Apologies if I decide not to reply to any further
objections.
What exactly do you mean by "coincidence"? You seem to
be tending towards the idea that "everything that
happens happens for a reason", which is used by many
religious apologists to handwave away tragedy, and I
don't want to get stuck in that black hole due to a
misunderstanding.
Everything has a cause, not necessarily a reason. I guess I expressed myself
in inadequate terms. What I meant was that I believe that, at the most
fundamental level, nothing in the universe is stochastic.
As to quantum
randomness, asking why a nucleus happened to decay at
time X instead of time Y seems to me to be as futile
as asking why the constant in Einstein's field
equation is
25.13 and not .159.
I dont think were talking about the same thing. I was talking about
Heisenberg uncertainty.
Due to the lack of time
travel, this can't loop back on itself, and if it went
to infinity the universe would already have decayed
into a maximum-entropy state. Therefore, there must be
some event A in our universe which doesn't have a
cause in our universe.
According to the bubble universe theory, the universe arose from the
residuum of a larger, decayed universe - a false vacuum. If the universe is
just one of countless bubbles, past and future could be infinite, so that
everything would have a cause. An interesting, though brief, article on
this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_adequacy_principle .
What do you mean by "the consciousness"? There's no
reason why consciousness should be conserved.
Granted. Its certainly possible that consciousness lasts only an
infinitesimal moment. But then, it also wouldnt be possible for
consciousness to be uploaded. In fact, if that is the case, everything in
the universe is pretty much senseless, as youll be dead the next moment
anyway - ostensibly to be replaced by another consciousness, so to speak.
If you
copy a mind into a computer, and leave the original
intact, you don't get one mind which is somehow
divided between them- you get two independent minds,
each of which has a prior memory of being you. The
idea of "uploading into a computer" means, presumably,
that you want to experience the glory of VR without
all the inconveniences of physical life.
And experience is essentially consciousness.
*Two* beings would wake up from the uploading process,
one physical and one upload, in the exact same manner
that two beings would wake up if you instantly gave
birth to identical twins.
(I assumed that, if the universe is infinite, there can be infinite copies
as well as two.)
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