From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 17:40:08 BST
August,
> scott
> you wrote:
>
> > The error is to think that there is some
> > "thing" called "me" that "has"
> > choices. The choices exist in their own right.
>
> It's an error to think that there is some "thing
> called "me"? I get the last part, the universe;
> reality would be static with out choices. Why doesn't
> your statement undo its self? I mean .. YOU said the
> above quote. Wouldn't that mean that you exist?
>
> What I'm asking is, didn't YOU CHOSE those words?
I am saying that I do not distinguish an "I" from the choices (and all other
events occurring in what I call "my mind", such as the "not
distinguishing").
In this view, the word "I" is to be considered only as what linguists call
anaphora: the locating in space and time of where the saying,
distinguishing, choosing occurs.
The word "exist" means to "stand out". In that sense I exist (my body can be
seen, what I say can be heard). But I do not assume that I have what
Buddhists call self-existence: any sort of permanence. To think otherwise is
to be a dualist: there is an "I" and there is the choice.
But to think that I am only a location of mental events would seem to be
contradicted by memory, or more generally, continuity. When I wake up in the
morning, I "remember who I am". Or I can hear a note of a song. If there is
no continuous "I" what makes it possible that I hear the whole note, and not
feel 440 changes a second of air pressure? Or how can I distinguish one
change in air pressure -- that is, there had to be a state of low pressure,
then a state of high pressure. How did the two states get connected? (To say
the brain connects them just pushes the problem into the brain: the nerve
cells are in one state then another, and maybe there is another nerve cell
that only gets excited when those two other states occur. So what detects
the difference between an excited nerve cell and an unexcited one? Only
another nerve cell.)
If space and time are fundamental, there is no way they can get connected.
Yet they are connected. Therefore, space and time are not fundamental.
Otherwise, one has to say that in every perceptive act I transcend space and
time. But to do so puts us back in dualism: there is a non-spatio-temporal I
that has the power to observe spatio-temporal events.
Well, that's no good, so what I think is the case is that the act of
observation creates the spatio-temporality of events. And, to avoid
solipsism, the same act creates the "I". Likewise, the choice creates the
particular typed words and the "I". (That is, the solipsist can say that I
create the events, while what I am suggesting is that what we call "things
and events" are all fundamentally non-spatio-temporal and it is the act of
observation that turns them into spatio-temporal things and events. For what
it's worth, this also provides a consistent interpretation of quantum
weirdness.).
- Scott
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