Elithrion comments on An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity - LessWrong

35 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 22 February 2013 08:44PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (68)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Elithrion 24 February 2013 05:02:45AM 4 points [-]

So I will try to be specific. I would ask the reader to entertain the possibility that reality is not the way it is portrayed in their favorite reductionist or platonic-computational model; that these are quite superficial and preliminary conceptions of reality, overlooking some very basic causal factors that we just haven't discovered yet, and "mathematical" insights that would completely reorder how we think of the formal part of these models, and correct understandings of what it means for something to exist and to have a property, and almost everything about how life is actually experienced and lived. And finally - here's the punchline - please consider the possibility that these aspects of reality, not yet present in your favorite formalisms and theories, are precisely such as to allow time, and a personal self, and the objective persistence of that self through time, to be real.

I'm not sure how saying "it's possible there's something we might not know yet which might make persistent selves real" is being specific. (And if there's anything any more specific than that in the paragraph, I seem to have missed it after reading it twice.)

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 24 February 2013 05:20:42AM *  2 points [-]

It's more specific than "science might be wrong when it contradicts [unspecified pre-scientiific belief]".

Also, I listed a variety of ways in which the current scientifically-inspired belief might be falling short.