The philosophical habit of skeptically deconstructing basic appearances seems to prepare people badly for the task of scientifically understanding consciousness. When considering the relationship between mind and matter, it’s a little peculiar to immediately jump to complicated possibilities
It wasn’t philosophers who came up with general relativity and quantum mechanics when everyday intuition about nature didn’t quite add up in some obscure corner cases. Coming up with a simple model that seems to resolve contradictions even if it doesn’t quite fit everyday intuition seems to be useful in gaining a better understanding of things.
I’m also having genuine difficulties going anywhere past the everyday intuition with the idea of the discontinuity of personal identity separate from the discontinuity of mindstate. The idea of there being only a sequence of conscious moments instead of an intrinsic continuity doesn’t present any immediately obvious contradiction and doesn’t have the confusion of exactly what the mindstate-independent component of continuous personal is really supposed to be.
Of course going with the mindstate history view, now the difference becomes the sliding scale of possible differences from the previous state. It looks like personal continuity would become a matter of degree rather than a binary thing, which pushes things further into the unintuitive.
I can’t think of any phenomenon in classical mechanics where I could point to any property of the system that would be disrupted if the system got disassembled and reassembled mid-evolution.
How about the property of being an asymptotically bound system, in the absence of active disassembly by external forces?
I’m afraid I don’t understand what that means. Can you give more concrete examples of physical things that do or don’t have this property?
The idea of there being only a sequence of conscious moments instead of an intrinsic continuity doesn’t present any immediately obvious contradiction
It contradicts the experience of time passing—the experience of change. The passage of time is an appearance, and an appearance is something stronger than an intuition. An intuition is a sort of guess about the truth, and may or may not be true, but one normally supposes that appearances definitely exist, at least as appearances. The object implied by a hallucination may not exist, but the hallucination itself does exist. It is always a very radical move to assert that an alleged appearance does not exist even on the plane of appearance. When you deny the existence of a subject which persists in time and which experiences time during that persistent existence, you are right on the edge of denying a fundamental appearance, or perhaps over the edge already.
Normally one supposes that there is an elemental experience of time flowing, and that this experience itself exists in time and somehow endures through time. When you disintegrate temporal experience into a set of distinct momentary experiences not actually joined by temporal flow, the most you can do to retain the appearance of flow is to say that each momentary experience has an illusion of flow. Nothing is ever actually happening in consciousness, but it always looks like it is. Consciousness in every moment is a static thing, but it always has an illusion of change embedded in it. (I suppose you could have a wacky theory of dynamic momentary experiences, whereby they’re all still distinct, but they do come into and then go out of existence, and the momentary appearance of flow is somehow derived from this; the illusion would then be the illusion of persistent flow.)
To sum up, it’s hard to have an actual experience of persistent flow without actually persisting. If you deny that, then either the experience of persistence or the experience of flow has to be called an illusion. And if one becomes willing to assert the persistence of the perceiver, the one having the experience, then there’s no particular reason to be minimalist about it—which I think would be the next step up for someone retreating from a position of temporal atomism. “OK, when I’m aware that time is passing, maybe it’s likely that I persistently exist throughout that experience. But what about when I’m just in the moment, and there’s a gap in time before I contrast the present with the past via memory? How do I know that there was continuity?” The simplest interpretation of this is to say that there was continuity, but you weren’t paying attention to it.
How about the property of being an asymptotically bound system, in the absence of active disassembly by external forces?
I’m afraid I don’t understand what that means. Can you give more concrete examples of physical things that do or don’t have this property?
Consider two gravitating objects. If they orbit a common center of gravity forever, we can call that asymptotically bound; if they eventually fly apart and become arbitrarily distant, they are asymptotically free. You could start with a system which, in the absence of perturbing influences, is asymptotically bound; then perturb it until it became asymptotically free, and then perturb it again in order to restore asymptotic boundedness.
It wasn’t philosophers who came up with general relativity and quantum mechanics when everyday intuition about nature didn’t quite add up in some obscure corner cases. Coming up with a simple model that seems to resolve contradictions even if it doesn’t quite fit everyday intuition seems to be useful in gaining a better understanding of things.
I’m also having genuine difficulties going anywhere past the everyday intuition with the idea of the discontinuity of personal identity separate from the discontinuity of mindstate. The idea of there being only a sequence of conscious moments instead of an intrinsic continuity doesn’t present any immediately obvious contradiction and doesn’t have the confusion of exactly what the mindstate-independent component of continuous personal is really supposed to be.
Of course going with the mindstate history view, now the difference becomes the sliding scale of possible differences from the previous state. It looks like personal continuity would become a matter of degree rather than a binary thing, which pushes things further into the unintuitive.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what that means. Can you give more concrete examples of physical things that do or don’t have this property?
It contradicts the experience of time passing—the experience of change. The passage of time is an appearance, and an appearance is something stronger than an intuition. An intuition is a sort of guess about the truth, and may or may not be true, but one normally supposes that appearances definitely exist, at least as appearances. The object implied by a hallucination may not exist, but the hallucination itself does exist. It is always a very radical move to assert that an alleged appearance does not exist even on the plane of appearance. When you deny the existence of a subject which persists in time and which experiences time during that persistent existence, you are right on the edge of denying a fundamental appearance, or perhaps over the edge already.
Normally one supposes that there is an elemental experience of time flowing, and that this experience itself exists in time and somehow endures through time. When you disintegrate temporal experience into a set of distinct momentary experiences not actually joined by temporal flow, the most you can do to retain the appearance of flow is to say that each momentary experience has an illusion of flow. Nothing is ever actually happening in consciousness, but it always looks like it is. Consciousness in every moment is a static thing, but it always has an illusion of change embedded in it. (I suppose you could have a wacky theory of dynamic momentary experiences, whereby they’re all still distinct, but they do come into and then go out of existence, and the momentary appearance of flow is somehow derived from this; the illusion would then be the illusion of persistent flow.)
To sum up, it’s hard to have an actual experience of persistent flow without actually persisting. If you deny that, then either the experience of persistence or the experience of flow has to be called an illusion. And if one becomes willing to assert the persistence of the perceiver, the one having the experience, then there’s no particular reason to be minimalist about it—which I think would be the next step up for someone retreating from a position of temporal atomism. “OK, when I’m aware that time is passing, maybe it’s likely that I persistently exist throughout that experience. But what about when I’m just in the moment, and there’s a gap in time before I contrast the present with the past via memory? How do I know that there was continuity?” The simplest interpretation of this is to say that there was continuity, but you weren’t paying attention to it.
Consider two gravitating objects. If they orbit a common center of gravity forever, we can call that asymptotically bound; if they eventually fly apart and become arbitrarily distant, they are asymptotically free. You could start with a system which, in the absence of perturbing influences, is asymptotically bound; then perturb it until it became asymptotically free, and then perturb it again in order to restore asymptotic boundedness.