What does “spacetime” mean? Is the real “you” neither a causal descendent, nor a causal ancestor, of any of your body’s actions? I’d have to put that down somewhere around argmin probability.
Or do you just mean that you consider the real you to be something like a platonic computation, which your material body instantiates? That’s not too far off from some realms of LW semi-orthodoxy.
Basically, after thinking about consciousness for a while, and personal identity, I’ve come to assign high probability to some sort of dualism/idealism being true. It might still be a sort of reductionist dualism, i.e. platonic computations.
So yes, the “platonic computation” theory would count. Do you think my original post ought to be revised given this information? I hope I haven’t been misleading.
As for spacetime and causation: If I’m a platonic form, I’m not in spacetime, nor am I causally related to my body in any normal sense. It all depends on how we define causation, and I tend to be reductionist/eliminativist about causation.
I don’t think you’ve been any more misleading than a dualist is pretty much required to be. The basic ambiguities of dualism do, of course, remain:
How does the non-spacetime stuff produce subjective experience, when spacetime stuff can’t?
How does your subjective experience correlate with the environment and actions of your material body, just as if there were two-way causation going on? (even when you reduce causation to a Pearl-style net, or to the large-scale behavior of many individually time-reversible components, this question remains).
(1) It’s not about producing subjective experience, it is about being subjective experience. The idea here is that massive, vague mereological fusions of subatomic stuff just aren’t the sort of thing that can be subjective experiences. Just as no fundamental particle can be a chariot, since chariots have parts.
(2) I have no idea yet. I’m considering some sort of interactionist dualism, or some sort of idealism, or some sort of mathematical multiverse theory with self-contained mathematical structures that play the role of Platonic computations, with measure assigned by a simplicity weighting that generates the appearance of a physical world.
And of course I’m considering reductionist physicalism, reductionist mathematical multiverse theory, etc. as well. That’s where the other 50% comes in.
What does “spacetime” mean? Is the real “you” neither a causal descendent, nor a causal ancestor, of any of your body’s actions? I’d have to put that down somewhere around argmin probability.
Or do you just mean that you consider the real you to be something like a platonic computation, which your material body instantiates? That’s not too far off from some realms of LW semi-orthodoxy.
Good questions. I’ll explain my reasoning:
Basically, after thinking about consciousness for a while, and personal identity, I’ve come to assign high probability to some sort of dualism/idealism being true. It might still be a sort of reductionist dualism, i.e. platonic computations.
So yes, the “platonic computation” theory would count. Do you think my original post ought to be revised given this information? I hope I haven’t been misleading.
As for spacetime and causation: If I’m a platonic form, I’m not in spacetime, nor am I causally related to my body in any normal sense. It all depends on how we define causation, and I tend to be reductionist/eliminativist about causation.
I don’t think you’ve been any more misleading than a dualist is pretty much required to be. The basic ambiguities of dualism do, of course, remain:
How does the non-spacetime stuff produce subjective experience, when spacetime stuff can’t?
How does your subjective experience correlate with the environment and actions of your material body, just as if there were two-way causation going on? (even when you reduce causation to a Pearl-style net, or to the large-scale behavior of many individually time-reversible components, this question remains).
(1) It’s not about producing subjective experience, it is about being subjective experience. The idea here is that massive, vague mereological fusions of subatomic stuff just aren’t the sort of thing that can be subjective experiences. Just as no fundamental particle can be a chariot, since chariots have parts.
(2) I have no idea yet. I’m considering some sort of interactionist dualism, or some sort of idealism, or some sort of mathematical multiverse theory with self-contained mathematical structures that play the role of Platonic computations, with measure assigned by a simplicity weighting that generates the appearance of a physical world.
And of course I’m considering reductionist physicalism, reductionist mathematical multiverse theory, etc. as well. That’s where the other 50% comes in.