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Wednesday, 5 October 2016
Imagine it were possible to snip out a segment of your lived experience, like a length of film or an interval in a stream of information. If you believe in a one-dimensional time (or a four-dimensional space-time. or n-dimensional?) then are you committed to believing that this is in principle possible? If it were analogous to extracting a delimited portion of a river's flow then it would be equivalent to a complete description of the state of every atom of the river and its environment at each moment of the given interval, so that you could tell exactly which successive states were predictable from prior states and which involved the additional action of unpredictable events, then you could find the perfectly minimal set of descriptors and you could use them to create a perfect simulation of the total event. In this way it could be repeated indefinitely in different media, and it would 'look' the same and 'sound' the same and 'feel' the same to the 'touch' as long as the required senses and actions were consistently simulated in the same medium. There would still remain a question of how far you needed to go, would it be enough that every macroscopically discernible eddy was duplicated, or would you insist that even the smallest shift in an energy level deep within the mass of water or in the immediate surroundings were accounted for? A level of perception would need to be defined in order to fix the meaning of duplication.
Returning to the original question we can imagine replacing the river with a brain and a body and conducting the same experiment, only now the perceptive organs (for want of a better name) are part of the same object system. Would a complete abstracted portion of your life result that could be run through again and again, in different media? And each time would it be you who was the experiencer, even long after the you in continuity with what you currently are had passed by, or passed away, literally or metaphorically, or would it be the operator of the simulation, or some artifact of the machine being used that would wake up to drinking a cup of tea or tying a shoelace, scratching an itch or thinking of a poem or rehearsing an attitude or trying to find something to say or all at once or whatever? It is hard to imagine a positive answer to either question. My experience if looked at closely, doesn't just feel like something, it only ever feels like me feeling something, and that is like nothing else - so that 'what does it feel like?' questions make no sense at all, unless in the context of asking for how something feels to the touch, rough, smooth, warm, cold etc. So it is impossible to imagine another inhabiting a portion of my life as distinct from merely sharing the same adventure, even if they are using VR apparatus. But it is also impossible to imagine being in two places at once, being in my current experience and being identically myself in the abstracted portion of my experience, played over and over again, who knows where and by who knows who.
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