Matter is forever

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Philip Thrift

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Jul 14, 2019, 6:49:37 AM7/14/19
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The Bhagavad Gita (on the eternality of matter and its transformability): "Material nature and the living entities should be understood to be beginningless. Their transformations and the modes of matter are products of material nature."

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Jul 14, 2019, 2:36:01 PM7/14/19
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Aha! Thrift. Have at you! What do you think about last month's reveal, by the University of Munich upon quasi-particles? 
Matter, indeed, may be forever? 
In other words this conceivably beats entropy. 

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Philip Thrift

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Jul 14, 2019, 6:51:51 PM7/14/19
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Bruno Marchal

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Jul 15, 2019, 8:02:46 AM7/15/19
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This reflects the two main Vedas: Advaita Veda, non dualist, and monist immaterialist. And the Vaita Veda, dualist and (weakly) materialist.

See my paper on the West and the East, for a little more, and how the []p&p/[]p duality makes possible to interpret the Vaita Veda as a phenomenology in the Advaita Veda.

Bruno



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Cosmin Visan

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Jul 15, 2019, 2:53:49 PM7/15/19
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What does "matter" even mean ? Saying "matter is forever" is like saying "sdgasdga is forever". Both sentences carry the same amount of meaning.

Philip Thrift

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Jul 15, 2019, 4:10:50 PM7/15/19
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On Monday, July 15, 2019 at 1:53:49 PM UTC-5, Cosmin Visan wrote:
What does "matter" even mean ? Saying "matter is forever" is like saying "sdgasdga is forever". Both sentences carry the same amount of meaning.

Is consciousness bounded in time? Is it eternal? Or is it timeless?

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Bruno Marchal

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Jul 16, 2019, 6:58:05 AM7/16/19
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The consciousness of the universal machine is timeless, and spaceless. It is somehow 100% unfocused, without any attention, and it might plausibly be related to the highly dissociative state that some people seemed to describe in experience with some drug. 

It is also the initial consciousness of all differentiating histories along the infinitely many computations.

I do not use this in my published work, but since sometimes, I am not sure we can avoid this conclusion. It is a certainly counter-intuitive. Yet it coorbariate the fact that time and space belong the category of mind (a bit like in Kant, and in other idealist philosophies, Greek or German). 

This could be wrong without entailing any change in what I consider already derived from mechanism. 

Bruno




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Brent Meeker

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Jul 16, 2019, 1:37:29 PM7/16/19
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On 7/16/2019 3:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> The consciousness of the universal machine is timeless, and spaceless.
> It is somehow 100% unfocused, without any attention, and it might
> plausibly be related to the highly dissociative state that some people
> seemed to describe in experience with some drug.

And yet you have to ask me how it is that your definition of
consciousness does not comport with my experience of it??

Brent

Bruno Marchal

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Jul 17, 2019, 6:29:46 AM7/17/19
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You are right. I have to ask you exactly that.

It would have helped if you could have been more specific.

Which one of the quasi-axioms does not met your experience?

1) Do you think it is false to be conscious for a conscious entity?

Or

2) Do you think it is false that consciousness is (immediately, without asking an intellectual effort) knowable?

Or

3) Do you think it is false that consciousness is not definable (without mentioning truth or god, …)

Or

4) Do you think it is false that a conscious entity cannot prove or justify rationally that it is conscious?

Or

5) Do you think that something important about consciousness is missing?

Bruno




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> Brent
>
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Cosmin Visan

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Jul 17, 2019, 7:28:42 AM7/17/19
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Self-reference is eternal. And then self-reference finds objects within itself, including time, time being an object like any other, like color red. And self-reference itself not being an object, it is not bound to the law of non-contradiction, so it can find multiple objects in itself at the same time. That's why consciousnesses such as ourselves are all objects that exist in self-reference.

Brent Meeker

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Jul 17, 2019, 2:32:32 PM7/17/19
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On 7/17/2019 3:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> On 16 Jul 2019, at 19:37, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 7/16/2019 3:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> The consciousness of the universal machine is timeless, and spaceless. It is somehow 100% unfocused, without any attention, and it might plausibly be related to the highly dissociative state that some people seemed to describe in experience with some drug.
>> And yet you have to ask me how it is that your definition of consciousness does not comport with my experience of it??
> You are right. I have to ask you exactly that.
>
> It would have helped if you could have been more specific.
>
> Which one of the quasi-axioms does not met your experience?
>
> 1) Do you think it is false to be conscious for a conscious entity?

??  That a tautology, not a quasi-axiom.

>
> Or
>
> 2) Do you think it is false that consciousness is (immediately, without asking an intellectual effort) knowable?

I'm not sure that's true.  I think consciousness is knowable on
reflection: "Yes, I was conscious of that."  But I'm not sure what
"immediately" means in this context.
>
> Or
>
> 3) Do you think it is false that consciousness is not definable (without mentioning truth or god, …)

I don't know what that means.    If I say "Consciousness is an inner
narrative." have I mentioned "truth" because I think that's a true
statement?  And what god do you refer to?  Bal, Yawheh, Zeus, Loki,
Thor,...  And what do they have to do with it?

>
> Or
>
> 4) Do you think it is false that a conscious entity cannot prove or justify rationally that it is conscious?

Yes, I think this is false.  I think a conscious entity must be able to
show a certain level of intelligence.

>
> Or
>
> 5) Do you think that something important about consciousness is missing?

Yes.  It says nothing about being conscious OF something or acting
intelligently.  Within that definition a rock could be conscious.

Brent

Bruno Marchal

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Jul 18, 2019, 7:58:14 AM7/18/19
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> On 17 Jul 2019, at 20:32, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 7/17/2019 3:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> On 16 Jul 2019, at 19:37, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 7/16/2019 3:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>> The consciousness of the universal machine is timeless, and spaceless. It is somehow 100% unfocused, without any attention, and it might plausibly be related to the highly dissociative state that some people seemed to describe in experience with some drug.
>>> And yet you have to ask me how it is that your definition of consciousness does not comport with my experience of it??
>> You are right. I have to ask you exactly that.
>>
>> It would have helped if you could have been more specific.
>>
>> Which one of the quasi-axioms does not met your experience?
>>
>> 1) Do you think it is false to be conscious for a conscious entity?
>
> ?? That a tautology, not a quasi-axiom.

I agree partially. But “truth” is not definable, and so this is still a meta-axiom, even if a trivial one. Telling me that it is tautological means that you agree with it. You agree that consciousness is before all a truth. Not all people agree with this, some claim it is an illusion, and I think we have already agreed that this is … a contradiction (the negation of a tautology).

Think about consistency. It is trivial that a consistent machine is consistent, but we have to invoke this “tautology” to better understand that if a machine is consistent it cannot prove that it is consistent. Similarly we have that consciousness is a truth that cannot be proved, nor defined, so it helps to make it clear that we accept it is true and thus meaningful. Some claims that consciousness does not exist and is an illusion, and the first axiom is used just to eliminate that conception in this theory.



>
>>
>> Or
>>
>> 2) Do you think it is false that consciousness is (immediately, without asking an intellectual effort) knowable?
>
> I'm not sure that's true. I think consciousness is knowable on reflection: "Yes, I was conscious of that." But I'm not sure what "immediately" means in this context.

It means that you don’t have to make a reasoning to conclude that you are conscious. A sort of reasoning might be done through the activity of your brain, but it will not be consciously made, so that from your first person perspective, it looks like, from the conscious first person perspective, consciousness is a given.

OK?



>>
>> Or
>>
>> 3) Do you think it is false that consciousness is not definable (without mentioning truth or god, …)
>
> I don't know what that means. If I say "Consciousness is an inner narrative." have I mentioned "truth" because I think that's a true statement? And what god do you refer to? Bal, Yawheh, Zeus, Loki, Thor,... And what do they have to do with it?

Consciousness here is the brute consciousness, not the higher reflexive consciousness (that one is obtained with the Löbian machine, but not any arbitrary universal machine). When you are conscious of some pain, that does not need to be accompanied by a inner narrative.



>
>>
>> Or
>>
>> 4) Do you think it is false that a conscious entity cannot prove or justify rationally that it is conscious?
>
> Yes, I think this is false. I think a conscious entity must be able to show a certain level of intelligence.

I don’t see the relation between your answer and “4)”. To say that it is false "that a conscious entity cannot prove or justify rationally that it is conscious” means that you believe that some entity can justify rationally that it she/him/it is conscious.



>
>>
>> Or
>>
>> 5) Do you think that something important about consciousness is missing?
>
> Yes. It says nothing about being conscious OF something or acting intelligently. Within that definition a rock could be conscious.

You lost me here. It is a bit like saying “I don’t accept your definition of group” because it does not address the abelian groups. Once we agree on consciousness, we can tackle the question of "conscious of”, which is rather subtle in the mechanist framework, as the things referred too might be the root of the mind-body problem. But I told you the basic idea, which is that consciousness mirror consistency, and consciousness of p will mirror the consciousness of p.

Bruno




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