From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 23:28:58 MST
Hal writes
> I know of some people who go beyond [level seven]:
>
> 8. Logically anticipates all experiences of all conscious entities,
> self or other, human or alien, past or future, near or far.
Anticipation, I will go on to claim, is, when logically analyzed,
such an unreliable concept that such a proposal really can't do
violence to it.
> One example is philosopher Arnold Zuboff, who in a paper called "Moment
> Universals and Personal Identity" (not available online), proposes
> that the elementary elements of our conscious experience, instants
> of consciousness, are so simple and structureless that they are shared
> across multiple streams of consciousness. In the end he concludes that
> there is only one conscious entity in existence, and that we are all
> parts of that entity.
This is, of course, in complete denial that persons exist,
and I want it to turn out that I exist, and that my life
is worth saving (as opposed, say, to having several
duplicates of you created in my stead).
I would think, however, that we would have good grounds for
being skeptical of "instants of consciousness" as being
extremely simple and structureless. We may find so many
areas of our brains and the brains of higher animals involved
that consciousness comes to be seen as a special, intricate
process.
> A similar idea is involved in the concept of "observer-moments",
> which I think was originated by Nick Bostrom. Nick's ideas can be
> found at www.anthropic-principle.com. He discusses the "self-selection
> assumption", that we should consider ourselves a randomly chosen conscious
> observer; and extends this into the "absolute self-selection assumption",
> which is that we should consider our observer-moment to be a randomly
> chosen observer-moment from among all instances of consciousness in
> the universe. This leads to the concept that the apparent continuity
> of observer-moments is illusory, or at least unimportant, and that all
> observer-moments exist independently.
If we consider ourselves "a randomly chosen conscious observer",
does this mean that the current biological entity to which we
apparently belong varies from time to time? The words "randomly
chosen" do seem to pick out a biological entity (at this time 2002).
A similar idea (to me, at any rate, until I understand his better)
is that consciousness processing in your brain is basically identical
to consciousness processing in mine---it just works with different
memories. But are memories necessarily so different? That is, a
memory (or a story) could be broken down into its constituent elements
and we all have just about the same ones, only that they get played back
in different orders. Indeed, I have felt that when anyone derives the
solution to the general quadratic equation I'm already a little bit there.
One thing that these theories appear to have in common is that they
promote altruism and work against selfishness.
> Of course, acting on level 8 is likely to be evolutionarily counter-
> productive so there will probably always be relatively few people who
> adopt this position. Level 7 actors in contrast are likely to succeed
> and spread.
Very true, but success can't of course necessarily be regarded
as truth. Now if there is a truth to the matter of whether persons
exist, then it also seems that level 7 is as far as *you* can go.
Lee
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