SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 12:59 pm
PS: if anyone thinks it would be worth the effort and knows how to contact and communicate with Donald Hoffman, it would be OK by me to share my thoughts with him in the spirit of constructive dialogue. Writing in longer and more formal form of "official" publications is a very big challenge for me nowadays for variety of reasons.
Some years ago I exchanged a couple of emails with Don (you can see his email on his website
http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ )
At that time I was musing on the ideas that I outlined in the
metaphor. I wanted to ask him few things but I got the feeling he's not inclined to spend time on general speculations.
Actually I was led to this (the previous) forum in a similar way. Since I don't have any philosophical background, neither I have philosopher friends, I tried to contact few people. Michael Bitbol never responded. Bernardo responded and invited to the forum but apparently he didn't have the time to look in my questions. And I don't blame any of them. I can only imagine how many such emails they have to go through on daily basis.
What I was asking was to be pointed at some current/past philosophical developments that take time in the sense of the metaphor. My thinking was that we don't experience the time flow in certain direction because of some external law (like increasing entropy, etc.) but because this is the only way stream of consciousness can be experienced. For example, in physics we have phase space of all possible states of the universe. Then we have a law that describes the transition from state to state. We as humans, experience the transitions and ask what that law governing the transitions is. We ask this question because we implicitly assume that the universe will make these transitions even if there's no one to observe them - thus there should be a law for the direction and our consciousness only observes the workings of that law. My point was that there's no need for such a law. If we imagine a phase space of states of being, then the only way we can ever experience a stream of existence is if the states progress in integrative way, such that every next state embeds the echo of the previous ones as memory. Even if we hypothesize that the transition to all other states is possible, if they don't correspond to a gradual increment over the former state and don't containing the echo of the chain that led to them, we'll simply have no conscious experience that we can talk about. So it's something like the anthropic principle applied to time/consciousness. It allows us to think of all possible states of being existing simultaneously and experienced in an integrative flow.
I was interested where I can see other's works in the same lines because it's certain that many others have come to these ideas long before me. Unfortunately I still don't know the answer.
~~~
Other than that, as others already pointed out, I'm also on the opinion that strict mathematical theory of consciousness can never be. Donald said that "mathematics are everywhere we look". I see two aspects of this. The first is the more trivial - we see mathematics everywhere because we look at everything through mathematical glasses. A shoemaker might view the whole reality as different metamorphoses of the Archetypal Shoe. A painter can see everything as canvases and paint strokes. We see in reality whatever concepts and ideas we project over the perceptions. This is the more superficial aspect.
The deeper aspect is that mathematics is the closest we can get to clean experience of the spiritual realm through intellectual thinking. In pure thinking (mathematics included) we are already living in the spiritual world. In mathematics we find thinking that supports itself, it's the object of itself, independent of sensory and other perceptions. The mathematical thoughts are determined through their inner relations. This is a prelude to what the ego secretly yearns for but has not yet the courage to approach - the wider spiritual world, of which mathematical thinking is only a rigidified instance. In our ordinary consciousness perceptions and concepts are somewhat orthogonal - we connect them together but we can't say that they are organically connected (except for the perceptions of our own thinking). That's the intuitive reason to assume our concepts are only representations of reality (the 'real' thing causing the perceptions). And this is natural, the concepts seem like inert mineral-like entities. It is only through our own thinking that they are set in motion and connected to perceptions. We have no reason to assume concepts/ideas as having some creative role.
In the Imaginative realm we find concepts in their more fundamental essence, as creative processes/beings and we directly perceive how ideas shape the perceptual world. The difference is marked. In our ordinary state our concepts are only like frozen extracts of the higher realm that are completely dead and motionless if it was not that we move them through our thinking. The living idea processes have life of their own, they are moving themselves, without any action on our part. And it's for this reason that we can perceive how they are also transforming the perceptual elements. They are no longer orthogonal inert elements that can be related only through our activity but the perceptual elements reflect the life of the living ideas.
For example, if in ordinary consciousness I experience hunger, I attach the abstract concept of 'hunger' to this feeling. To me it seems only as a representational label for some 'real' process for which I have perception (the feeling of hunger). In the Imaginative world I find the actual being of hunger, which in my ordinary state precipitates only as a concept, an idea. In the higher world hunger is an active, living idea/being, interacting with other processes/beings, for example activating salivation, attracting the images of my favorite food etc.