

Sunyata - arram
http://arram.posterous.com/sunyata

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jwecker
Nice Arram, thanks. I was just thinking the other day about how nice it would
be if more people spent time once in a while refining their thoughts into an
essay rather than barfing up conjectures as blog posts.

Interestingly, it may be that Heisenberg uncertainly requires that if you
extract all of the information out of Riker in order to reform him, you must
necessarily destroy the original Riker, saving you a bullet. (IANAP,
_obviously_).

~~~
arram
Agreed that you couldn't actually get a _perfect_ copy (e.g. exchanging
accuracy in momentum information for accuracy in position information), but it
really doesn't matter. You change on a more dramatic scale when you go from a
cold room to a warm room, or when you scrape your elbow, etc. Details at that
scale are pretty irrelevant to _you_.

~~~
abstractbill
_Details at that scale are pretty irrelevant to you._

Sorry, but [citation needed]. Penrose, for one, thinks details on that scale
are the _essence_ of you.

~~~
arram
You're talking about his quantum tubules theory of consciousness. Honestly, I
think it's coming from the same emotional agenda that made Geocentrism and
later Vitalism so popular. It's just the latest philosophical secret sauce.

Besides, that's just trying to explain qualia. Pretty sure no one thinks
memories are quantum phenomena.

~~~
abstractbill
Actually Penrose isn't so much interested in qualia as he is in things
mathematicians can do, but which Turing machines cannot (from
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind> \- "Penrose is not interested in
explaining phenomenal consciousness, qualia, generally regarded as the most
mysterious feature of consciousness, but instead focuses mainly on the
cognitive powers of mathematicians").

~~~
jplewicke
If I have closed timelike curves, an oracle for the halting problem, or the
ability to perform arbitrary computations on real numbers in my brain, I would
certainly like to know how to use them.

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endtwist
For those of you who haven't seen it, the movie _The Prestige_ (IMDB:
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/>) deals with this topic of transient
existence of people, albeit in the context of magicians and science. It's a
_very_ good movie, to boot.

~~~
arram
Yea, I was excited when I first saw that movie. The main character completely
failed to understand what was going on: "Would I be the one transported, or
the one in the tank?" He was both, but the selection bias of being able to ask
that question would make him seem very lucky.

~~~
bd
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality>

------
Hexstream
"Some say our memories are what make us us, but basic physics dictate that our
memory has finite capacity. New memories supplant the old and the strongest
are those recalled and refreshed frequently. Given a thousand years to live,
you could conceivably forget everything you now know. Personal history is a
revolving door."

Some people have a weird condition where they remember EVERYTHING from a
certain point in their lives, they never forget anything. I'm sure they have a
_finite_ amount of memory, but it's so big it's infinite _in practice_.

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pygy_
Identity is indeed elusive. I tend to think of myself as a process too, i.e. a
braid of selfupdating information embedded in space-time (did that make any
sense? (-: ).

What puzzles me the most is the permanence of identity despite the
siscontinuity of the conscious experience. Why and how am I still the same
person in the morning than I was when I fell asleep?

One could argue that the abundant neural activity that happens during the
night preservres yourself...

What about deep phenobarbital-induced general anesthesia, which induces a flat
EEG? No more neural activity... Your self is preserved through the
"structural" properties of your brain.

Which leads me to another point: the structure/function distinction is a false
dichotomy, an artefact of the human thinking process. The concept isn't new
for the many Lisp hackers around here, but the idea can be extended to the
organisation of the universe. The (neuro)psychologist's structure is the
neurologist's function. Recurse up to elementary particles whose dual
wave/particle nature has been extensively documented.

Physics will not be complete until the nature of subjectivity is understood.
It may never be complete, for that matter.

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jcl
Reminds me of Feynman's "The Value of Science" speech:

"For instance, the scientific article says, perhaps, something like this: "The
radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-
half in a period of two weeks." Now, what does that mean?

"It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat (and also in mine, and
yours) is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago, but that all of the
atoms that are in the brain are being replaced, and the ones that were there
before have gone away.

"So what is this mind, what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's
potatoes! That is what now can remember what was going on in my mind a year
ago -- a mind which has long ago been replaced.

"This is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of
the brain to be replaced by other atoms, to note that the thing which I call
my individuality is only a pattern or dance. The atoms come into my brain,
dance a dance, then go out; always new atoms but always doing the same dance,
remembering what the dance was yesterday."

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swombat
If you're looking for a good introductory book to some of the
buddhist/taoist/zen concepts touched upon in this article, I highly recommend
Alan Watts' books.

Here's one that I've particularly enjoyed:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eastern-Wisdom-Modern-Life-
Collected...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eastern-Wisdom-Modern-Life-
Collected/dp/1577311809/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268337707&sr=8-1)

It's a collection of lectures that he gave over a decade or so, in the 60s. It
introduces most of the really important concepts of eastern philosophy.

This book provides a nice follow-up to the previous one, with a much more
complete, detailed, academic view of the topics, which helps gain a better
understanding of it all:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Zen-Vintage-Spiritual-
Classics/d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Zen-Vintage-Spiritual-
Classics/dp/0375705104/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268337772&sr=8-3)

~~~
Estragon
The OP presents a conceptual, ontological claim ("...that all things lack
absolute identity and are interdependent."), whereas in Buddhist practice, it
refers to the _experience_ of looking for some inherent existence, and seeing
nothing. It's not an ontological issue in that context: There could actually
be an absolute identity, but it would have no bearing on the practice.

Alan Watts only ever confused me. These two guys made it a whole lot clearer
for me. (Particularly Ken. I consider him my teacher.)

<http://unfetteredmind.org/audio/podclass.php?code=AP#here>

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keithtom
Really interesting article. Sunyata makes me think of string theory for some
reason. To give another perspective on 'we are not matter', we can view
ourselves as a configuration of atoms.

And if you zoom in more, those atoms (carbon, hydrogen etc.) are just
different configurations of electrons, protons and neutrons.

At the end of the day, string theory zooms in even more and says that those
particles are made of just one thing - a 'string'. And the different particles
are manifestations of strings vibrating w/ different energies and patterns
(like how a musical instrument makes different notes w/ different vibrations).

That idea paints the universe as as one grand orchestra. Each string not
really different from the next (fungibility) and somewhat interdependent. In
short, Sunyata.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
We're a wave function, always in motion and never deterministic. We are a
verb!

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delackner
This sort of question about the difference between a copy of you continuing to
exist, and you yourself (the original "copy") continuing to exist; whenever I
see this question in its various forms, I wonder if the question is being
truly sincerely asked.

The obvious and meaningful answer is that the experience _you_ have is of the
total end of all further experience. Death. One or even a thousand completely
perfect copies of you living onward in the universe is no comfort when the
consciousness that started the whole game is not around to experience it.

Or in more simple form,

If you put someone to sleep, and haul them across a room, and then they wake
up, this is totally different from writing down their entire molecuar
composition, burning their atoms to a cinder, and then reconstituting said
molecular composition on the other side of the room. What wakes up is not you.
You are a burnt ash in the wastebin.

The truly fascinating question no one is discussing is: since our
consciousness is made up of a vast combination of distinct physical parts, it
could one day be possible to slowly replace those parts with artificial parts,
with the transition from 100% original to 100% new parts being a transition in
phases so small that the consciousness is never interrupted. The resulting
being is YOU, but at the end, all of what was you is gone.

Addendum: People who have suffered severe trauma and lost large sections of
the brain have managed to live. If the substrate of the mind in question was
an artificial system that can deal with such traumatic removals of core
pieces, is there some cross section of the constituent parts of the human mind
that you could sever in half and end up with two distinct yet continuously
conscious entities?

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Luc
How about this: with every breath, you inhale a million billion billion atoms
of oxygen. When you exhale, these atoms take a couple of years to be uniformly
mixed in the atmosphere. Chances are you a breathing oxygen that was once in
the lungs of, say, Shakespeare! (though, also, in dog farts). Before that,
this same oxygen was created by fusion in the inside of a star, which died so
we could live.

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levesque
This article made me think of this :

" You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the
same decaying organic matter as everything else. "

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praptak
The observation that boundaries of things are arbitrary is also important to
materialist dialectics. Quote Leon Trotsky: "In reality a pound of sugar is
never equal to a pound of sugar—a more delicate scale always discloses a
difference. Again one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself.
Neither is this true—all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight,
colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves."

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bd
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change>

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shrikant
FYI, folks: 'Shoon-yuh-thaah', not 'piñata'.

.

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kaddar
Your cells are new every 10 years. [Citation Needed]

~~~
pygy_
... with the notable exception of (most) of your neurons. The only exception
happens in the hippocampus which is involved in long term memory.

(As a side note, a reduced turnover of these neurons is associated with
depression, but I don't know what's the cause and what's the consequence.)

Some cells have a much higher turnover(almost daily). I think of the immune
system and of some epithelial cells (especially in the digestive tract).

Your ten years figure seems to be a reasonable median, but I don't have any
data to back it up either.

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csmeder
Very nicely put, thanks for sharing

