71–80 of 280 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
A consequence of time is that every event does not all happen at once. A consequence of space is that everything is not all in one place. Perhaps a consequence of spacetime is that events have a location and a moment, but no guarantee of order?
I recall as a child once that I literally thought the following: > I can accept that the universe can give rise to agents with RI or AI. I can even accept that as a consequence of this, some of these agents may have self awareness. I am such an agent. Yet, I struggle comming to terms with the fact that "I" am aware of myself. I wish I could live long enough to find out how.
Over time, our picture of the universe become more clear with more understanding. If you think about the direction we are heading, you might imagine the picture becomes so clear, that the act itself enters into the picture of the universe and you find yourself staring into a mirror.
I recall as a child once that I literally thought the following: > I can accept that the universe can give rise to agents with RI or AI. I can even accept that as a consequence of this, some of these agents may have self awareness. I am such an agent. Yet, I struggle comming to terms with the fact that "I" am aware of myself. I wish I could live long enough to find out how.
Yeah. I think a lot of people have that issue. I have read about and understood a lot of physicalist theories of consciousness, but I have yet to see one that explains my subjective bubble of experience. I could see how this is all an illusion, but I can't see why I can perceive it then, why I have these vivid subjective experiences. Conciousness is really quite odd, especially because I realized that most of the imp…
I understand the sentiment here, but I also think we should be careful when it comes to the assumption that the truth -- whatever it happens to be -- will be a testable theory. Whether or not something is true is a fact independent of larger epistemological concerns.
Then again, perhaps you're just saying that if the truth turns out to be non-testable, then the truth won't be satisfying, which is a reasonable position (and I might agree).
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"Muddle-headed confusion" is harsh. I'd prefer something like "human intuition not being particularly reliable on questions it wasn't evolved for". If preserving a sense of profound mystery is your goal then... honestly, that mindset is sufficiently alien to me that I can't really think of anything useful to say on the subject. I can understand and share it as an aesthetic choice - mysteries are cool! - but not as a…
Maybe "Why am I I?" is an expression of dissatisfaction at being trapped in the prison of the self. That I only get to experience my experiences, and not other people's. Maybe the answer to the question then is not a proposition, but a liberation from that prison. If one is a religious believer, one might hope for that liberation after death. If one is a transhumanist (which is maybe just a different sort of religion…
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This is interesting, very interesting take, but it still doesn't explain where _other_ people's consciousness comes from. Through reductive reasoning, it doesn't explain why calculators and any matter shouldn't have consciousness.
A calculator processes maybe 64bits, in a machinery that is rather limited, certainly not enough to emulate it's environment, unless a more complex machine operates it.
So I doubt that any amount of bits will do any good, just like no math equation is going to become conscious. What would it even mean for an equation or bits of information to have conscious experiences?
In summary, neutral monism. In my opinion, here is a far better article on the same topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/
Neutral monism means that matter and consciousness emerge from something which is neither (like math in the platonic sense or something we have no conception of).
Of course. We are matter.
> Our own consciousness is also usually consciousness of something -- it involves awareness or contemplation of things in the world, abstract ideas, or the self. But someone who is dreaming an incoherent dream or hallucinating wildly would still be conscious in the sense of having some kind of subjective experience, even though they are not conscious of anything in particular.
I have no way to prove this, but I firmly believe that even in extreme states of consciousness, we are still conscious of something, in the sense that our attention is directed somewhere... our mind is always attending to something in particular. That "something" could be a bizarre fragment of a bizarre experience, but it's still something. I don't believe it's possible to be conscious without our attention being directed somewhere, even when the content of our experience appears to be maximally diffuse and unfocused. (In those cases, the content just is the object of our attention, the thing we are conscious of.)
I've hypothesized something very similar on my own. Perhaps we'll discover that consciousness, or rather the experience of consciousness, is either a property of matter in specific complex arrangements. Or not matter but perhaps spacetime in some respect. It doesn't really explain how consciousness works, but could explain why it's been so hard for us to understand, just as we don't really understand the nature of ex…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
A consequence of time is that every event does not all happen at once. A consequence of space is that everything is not all in one place. Perhaps a consequence of spacetime is that events have a location and a moment, but no guarantee of order?
But yes, you are sort of correct, two events can have the same metric, and one would not be able to distinguish which of them is responsible, if they are both capable of becoming present at the same speed.