From: Reilly Jones (Reilly@compuserve.com)
Date: Tue Mar 03 1998 - 14:48:33 MST
Ian Goddard wrote 3/3/98:
>...there still is a subjective "I" separate from everything else in the
>universe. This separation is what makes it impossible for anyone to ever
>produce a valid scientific theory of consciousness, each individual
>consciousness is utterly unique and totally inaccessible.
IAN: OK, so you posit that because an identity is
unique it is separated and not connected to other
identities.
No, Ian, that is not what I am positing. You broke into my quote after my
inherent agreement with you. My quote began: "I agree with you that the
self, through consciousness, freely roams the universe. Consciousness may
be a point aspect of the backwards-in-time microcausality from Cramer's
transactional QM interpretation. However, there still is a subjective "I"
separate from everything else in the universe...." Spatially, our
consciousness travels every possible backwards-in-time microcausal history,
in so doing, it is one with the local universe (local meaning the universe
as constructed at the Planck scale, not constructions at other scales).
So, no separation spatially in this sense. Again, however, we do have an
internal subjective unique "I" that is separate from each other and from
external reality. It is separated and yet connected. The biggest
connection is through language, Eric Voegelin posits this connection to be
"community substance," a separate entity than either the subjective "I" or
external reality. I have termed it "consensual reality" on the list
before, but people got tired of it.
>You, Ian, cannot ever feel what I feel inside, nor can any experiment
>test any theory about what I feel, subjectivity is impenetrable.
IAN: True, but that limitation only defines a
limit on my nervous system, not my identity/self.
That "my" in "my nervous system," why isn't there just a universal nervous
system? Why do you use the term "my" if "my" isn't separate? You simply
cannot define away subjectivity with any set of axioms or predicates. The
axiom-making or predicate-making entity precedes the axioms and predicates
and that entity is unique and impenetrable, a point source of force.
Sometime, pick up Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" (1953).
>There really is something that gives coherency to the subjective
>"I" and that something constructs a boundary between one quark
>or bit of substance and the quark immediately next to it.
IAN: What is this "something."
You brought this up when you wrote 3/1/98: <The most persuasive argument
about the nature of the individual "soul" that I've heard is that it is
more than the atoms of which the brain is composed, but this "more" is not
a supernatural spirit, it's simply the ordering of those atoms.>
Rather than "ordering," which is a more static term, I think "coherency" is
a more dynamic term. But if you like the term "ordering" better, what were
you referring to, what provides the ordering?
Phil Chapman wrote this lovely poem 3/3/98:
Blue
If I think blue and ask you too
You will but then again you won't
For I've seen skies you've never seen
And you've said things I've not
So since my blue is blue to me
And yours to me is not
Then I'll think blue and so will you
But we'll be blue, apart
Ah, the beauty of the analog! How I weary of this digital age, where half
of reality is sampled out of existence, and with algorithms and compression
techniques, more than half. What a paucity! How threadbare! And if I
find out that "Phil Chapman" is really a computer, hacking poetry together,
well then, I'll delete this file and move on to something meaningful.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reilly Jones | Philosophy of Technology:
Reilly@compuserve.com | The rational, moral and political relations
| between 'How we create' and 'Why we create'
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