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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11

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Minny McNinny said:
I give up this is like trying to map a maze. Thanks to all.

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Love this maze, @Minnie. Thanks for sharing it. {this is a post from me, constance}
 
Frank Stalter said:
This is apparently a legitimate message from @Frank Stalter himself, with which I (constance) whole-heartedly agree. Sorry for being incorporated into your identity and Paracast account, Frank, though I've had and so far have no control over it. I'll get out of the way as soon as I can. :)
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I, like Richard Doty, blame everything on the CIA. It's all their fault.
 
USI Calgary said:
That's one of the other philosophical issues I alluded to, the Ship of Theseus paradox. It is essentially a temporal issue. If time is quantized, then we're literally never the same person for more that one clock cycle, and indeed any sense of true self is purely illusory. However there is still a difference between that and downloading, because downloading typically leaves the original intact while duplicating it at another location. So we have the original and the copy existing in the same temporal frame of reference. @Constance, being the resident Ponty expert, does he ever touch on this issue?
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I would think that you would want to graduallly transfer the phenomenological "mineness" gradually--destroying the original and replacing it with another. I think the Bobiverse series is interesting because it covers the idea of a human being being "uploaded" into an AI matrix and later finds himself (or itself) making clones of itself in true von neuman probe fashion.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LWAESYQ/?tag=rockoids-20

Cloning I suppose duplicates a PSM (phenomenal self model) in another body -- then you have two entities who have separate "mineness" at an instant followed by divergence due to their inevitable differences in how they will further interact coupled into each their own situations. However if one PSM were to simply expand itself to two bodily entities after the cloning...hmmm...not sure about that.
 
Soupie said:
Playing devils advocate, there is good reason to believe that subjective experience is an executive summary of the body-environment interaction. So although the entire body is causally involved with SE, it is only indirectly.

Also, there are at least a few qualia which correspond to multiple stimuli, for ex bitterness and green. The taste of bitterness can be triggered by several different chemicals and the color green is triggered by a range of em wavelengths.

So again playing devils advocate, theoretically one wouldn't have to create a full copy of an organism to get similar subjective experience.
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"Mineness" is at issue here I would think--sure you could clone a subjective experience into two different entities, but then each of those entities would have a different transactional history prio to that--so each would label within "themselves" their own realization of the same subjective experience. Easier to drop the "subjective" and just consider an experience which is clone into two separate beings with different transactional histories--I would imagine you would need to clone the rest of their respective histories. True, it is an executive summary, but one which relies on a tremendous amount of threads that will cause the overall result to diverge in each of the clones. Dennett likes to consider our conscioiusness as some kind of serial processing unit overlayed on multiple parallel processors of more or less somatic automata relating this or that sensation, feeling or though (or in Jungian terms: sublimation)

Consider the full copy of a marvelous subjective experience tied to the real world (a total solar eclipse)--both Alice and Bob are staring at the eclipse at the same moment and are quite speechless...how far back in time will the threads of their "experience" diverge before converging on the shared solar eclipse viewing. Perhaps Alice and Bob will later recall different feelings -- or they will find others who felt the same. Either way the shared experience is not enough (at least in this example) to converge their separate threads into one consciousness. Perhaps this is a bit of an unfair strawman--we could imagine taking over both Alice and Bob and sending them the exact same stimuli to converge each their own "worlds" into one--even then you would have to work backwards and rewrite a portion of Bob's (or Alice's) transactional history.
 
Constance said:
Ker Than, Symmetry in Nature: Fundamental Fact or Human Bias?

Symmetry in Nature: Fundamental Fact or Human Bias?

Extract:

". . . Mario Livio, a senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, wonders if our biological preference for symmetry is biasing our perception of the world, influencing what humans find beautiful or even affecting the way we conduct science.

Livio is the author of The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved (2005, Simon & Schuster Trade), a book that explores symmetry in everything from biology and physics to music and the visual arts.

"Because our brains are so fine tuned to detect symmetry, is it possible that both the tools that we use to determine the laws of nature and indeed our theories themselves have symmetry in them partly because our brains like to latch onto the symmetric part of the universe and not because it's the most fundamental thing?" Livio wonders. . . ."
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List of animals featuring external asymmetry - Wikipedia

More like a fundamental "rule of thumb" that allows for efficiency in embryological development...a kind of "forced move in design space" in most cases.
For more details...read the first 3 or 4 chapters of

https://www.amazon.com/dp/068482471X/?tag=rockoids-20
 
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Michael Allen said:
"Mineness" is at issue here I would think--sure you could clone a subjective experience into two different entities, but then each of those entities would have a different transactional history prio to that--so each would label within "themselves" their own realization of the same subjective experience. Easier to drop the "subjective" and just consider an experience which is clone into two separate beings with different transactional histories--I would imagine you would need to clone the rest of their respective histories. True, it is an executive summary, but one which relies on a tremendous amount of threads that will cause the overall result to diverge in each of the clones. Dennett likes to consider our conscioiusness as some kind of serial processing unit overlayed on multiple parallel processors of more or less somatic automata relating this or that sensation, feeling or though (or in Jungian terms: sublimation)

Consider the full copy of a marvelous subjective experience tied to the real world (a total solar eclipse)--both Alice and Bob are staring at the eclipse at the same moment and are quite speechless...how far back in time will the threads of their "experience" diverge before converging on the shared solar eclipse viewing. Perhaps Alice and Bob will later recall different feelings -- or they will find others who felt the same. Either way the shared experience is not enough (at least in this example) to converge their separate threads into one consciousness. Perhaps this is a bit of an unfair strawman--we could imagine taking over both Alice and Bob and sending them the exact same stimuli to converge each their own "worlds" into one--even then you would have to work backwards and rewrite a portion of Bob's (or Alice's) transactional history.
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>> True, it is an executive summary, but one which relies on a tremendous amount of threads that will cause the overall result to diverge in each of the clones.

The subjective experience would quickly, rapidly diverge, agreed. However, the feeling of being the self from which they were cloned would theoretically persist for both, I think.

Let's say it turns out that the executive summary which is subjective conscious experience is constituted by the frontal lobes (for arguments sake), including the individual's memories. Let's say that an individual named Jake has his frontal lobes physically cloned at his death two times over and those cloned frontal lobes are put into two android bodies that have CNS very similar to real Jake's.

Upon coming online, both android Jakes would have a sense of being the real Jake, complete with his memories. They would also have subjective experiences similar to the real jakes thanks to their replicated frontal lobes and their android bodies which interact w/ the environment very much like real Jake's body.

Both Jake replicas would feel like real Jake, or close enough to say—technically incorrectly—that real Jake's "consciousness had been downloaded" into android bodies.

However, of course, the two android Jake's would quickly begin to diverge as they experienced the world from their two different bodies.
 
Minny McNinny said:
Why did you hijack his account in the first place?
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I didn't, and wouldn't. My Paracast account was apparently overlapped or integrated with his in the forum software and my identity and access disappeared into his. There seems to be no way this can be corrected until @Gene Steinberg calls in his tech manager to straighten out the glitch. Randall said above that this has been happening with other accounts as well.

The point is that I cannot post under my own identity nor receive messages in my now locked-up account. I don't like this any more than you or Frank do.
 
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Frank Stalter said:
I didn't, and wouldn't. My Paracast account was apparently overlapped or integrated with his in the forum software and my identity and access disappeared into his. There seems to be no way this can be corrected until @Gene Steinberg calls in his tech manager to straighten out the glitch. Randall said above that this has been happening with other accounts as well.
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This has been fixed.
 
@Gene Steinberg, I'm not getting a log-in screen. The Alerts list is still available to me as Frank Stalter, and in posting this to you, as you can see, the Paracast Forum still thinks that's who I am. Can you give me a clue how to access the log-in screen, which has only ever appeared before for me after a local power failure (because I always select the option of remaining logged in, not having to log in each time I visit here). Thanks.
 
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Log off. Empty the browser cache.

The known cause of the login mixup was removed by removing an add-on to our server.
 
Thank you, Gene. I have logged out of Frank's account, closed my connection to the Paracast and then relinked to it, and proceeded to log in as myself, and this seems to working properly again. I'll so clear out my 'cache' following some instructions Randall provided a few days ago [instructions I have to relocate and follow since I have never cleared out my 'cache' before]. Again, many thanks for your help.
 
All, I have now been able to receive a message from Steve, sent six days ago and concerning the same problems:

"Looks like there are some problems on the forum. I've changed my password and logged out for now...you all might want to do this too. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Stephen"

:)

I'll write to him in messages and copy Gene's directions to him if that will enable him to return to our discussions. It seems he might not have come back since logging out, or tried and his access might not working if he needs to delete his 'cache'. My 'cache' doesn't seem to be interferring with my access, but I suppose it's possible that his could be doing that.
 
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I think once the legacy cache issues are fixed as you did we will be good. The cause was an add-on for the server that I terminated the other day. It was documented by the add-on developer, but the publisher of the forum system didn’t know of it.
 
@Frank Stalter, meant to thank you for your patience, sense of humor, and hospitality this last week. You were a very gracious, if inadvertent, host. I'm not surprised, but I appreciate your tolerance. :)
 
Constance said:
I don't think so, certainly not into any natural, organically embodied, living entity. Re computational entities engineered to experience 'subjectivity', how exactly would that be done?
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Have two subjects enjoying a single event...simple. What is difficult to clone is their respective history of experiences. So in a way it isn't possible.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk
 
@Michael Allen, you also wrote: "Easier to drop the "subjective" and just consider an experience which is clone into two separate beings with different transactional histories--I would imagine you would need to clone the rest of their respective histories."

Still sounds like science fiction. And as if you have not entered deeply enough into phenomenological philosophy to see that all actually lived experience is subjective, can't not be.
 
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