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Article 6050 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: santas@inf.ethz.ch (Philip Santas)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Hypothesis: I am a [sensory] Transducer
Message-ID: <1992Jun2.170743.14374@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
Date: 2 Jun 92 17:07:43 GMT
References: <STEPHEN.92Jun1004316@estragon.uchicago.edu> <1992Jun1.214536.2308@neptune.inf.ethz.ch> <STEPHEN.92Jun1235727@estragon.uchicago.edu>
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In article <STEPHEN.92Jun1235727@estragon.uchicago.edu> stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu (Stephen P Spackman) writes:
>santas@inf.ethz.ch (Philip Santas) writes:
>|I would say that the absence of an object defines a real world too.
>|Think of the world before your birth. You were not there,
>|even if we assume that the evolutionary path was leading to your creation.
>|This world was very much real.
>
>When I imagine a tree falling in a forest, I can imagine it whistling
>God Save the Queen. I can *imagine* the world before my birth, but I
>cannot experience it. I'm not (nor ever was) embedded in it; for me,
>it isn't real - or at least, no more real than plenty of other
>possible worlds I can cook up with equal ease. Maybe, of course, you
>are older than I am - but your information base is different from
>mine, anyway.

In other words, you cannot experience even the world you live in.
Objective and subjective reality coexist, but your current subjective reality
depends from the realities of the past, long before your existence.
You know the past of your family, town, country, world
and this is a part of your identity even if you had not experienced this directly.

>Alright, I admit it, I come from a religious background, and I believe
>in the indefeasibility and the irrelevance of an extratemporal
>creation: whether the past "happened" is for me an immense
>non-question. ONLY consistency models apply to it.

But sometimes you may feel proud of your past, 200 years ago.
People even kill for this.

>|On the other hand you can have _identical_ impressions of your environment
>|while living in different realities, simply because you cannot process
>|or grasp the whole reality. Newtonian theory can be sufficient for two worlds
>|which obey or not obey to the principles of relativity (in the one case it is
>|the limit humans can understand, in the other it is the general rule)
>
>Or we can define those as the same world, the same reality. Probably
>healthier, and more along the lines that physics has been persuing of
>late.

This is the point. Given a reduced amount of knowledge you cannot distinguish
among different worlds. Colombus had this problem in America (or India?)
Things change drammatically when enough information 'discovers' the differences.

>|>There are some amusing pathologies that can
>|>be constructed; a neat one person case is the upside-down glasses
>|>experiment; for the two-person case - have you ever had the experience
>|>of body-map crossover with (say) a lover, when you can't figure out
>|>who some piece of anatomy belongs to?]
>|
>|But after enough practising you can distinguish your parts from the others.
>
>That's a profoundly interesting fact, because it isn't a necessary
>characteristic of such systems, from the mathematical perspective.

For humans and generaly for models which learn from experience or trial and error,
it is a STANDARD characteristic.

>|>That's what Gibson's (rather unconvincing) cyberspace is about - why
>|>it has psychological power. Trite Godel reference goes here.  More
>|>important in practise, it explains why in "hard" CS virtual machines
>|>are such a big issue: it is (syntacto-) semantically essential that
>|>the actuality of reality be undecidable on the basis of internal
>|>evidence.
>|
>|Not if one discovers more facts about the reality.
>|Then there is a transit period, untill one comes to the equilibrium
>|about the actual reality, and its internal represenation.
>
>But there is in general a limit to the "facts" that you can discover.

So what? This only means that the objective and the subjective realities
can NEVER become the same, or even if they are, one cannot be sure of this :-)

Philip Santas

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