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Monday, 2 September 2019


If the experiencing inclusive of awareness were the running of an elaborate computer program then what would be needed to bring this about would be, in some ground reality, the installation of that program on a suitable device and that device's activation. In this case even if the resulting mind were able to discover its situation there would be no relation between the version of being internal to the unfolding computations and the being of the site in which that program was being run. It would be analogous to the disjunction between the diegetic world of a movie and the world of the screen in which it was being shown, except that in the latter case a direct connection exists between the seeing of the movie and the showing of the movie, both being in the same reality outside that of the movie-world. The former requires a moebius twist linking inside with outside. The complete independence of the two. It represents a possibility that can be imagined in the limit, but it goes strongly against our intuition as to the nature of awareness. One apparent solution to this dilemma is that the program does not need to be run, its giving rise to experiencing is assured merely by its existence as a formal object like a mathematical formula. This solution is no solution at all, just an immense question begging, but it seems to be the only way to save the initial assumption. There is something zen-like about its completely paradoxical nature which forecloses thought and leaves only mute wonder.

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