ART = Consciousness ?

Reilly Jones (Reilly@compuserve.com)
Mon, 2 Mar 1998 11:52:54 -0500

Ian Goddard wrote 3/2/98: <I think the answer points to individual
consciousness being a product not so much of one subatomic particle more
than others, but of a holistic concert of multiple entities, such that the
individual self is not in any one of the many entities of which it is
composed, but is only in them all. Being a radical holist, I see this
holistic principle extending even beyond the confines of the finite self to
encompass and contain the entire universe in the definition of "self," and
I believe that I prove this is a valid definition due to the fact that all
attributes of your identity and of my identity are derived from a holistic
relation that contains the whole.>

I agree with you that the self, through consciousness, freely roams the
universe. Consciousness may be a point aspect of the backwards-in-time
microcausality from Cramer's transactional QM interpretation. However,
there still is a subjective "I" separate from everything else in the
universe. This separation is what makes it impossible for anyone to ever
produce a valid scientific theory of consciousness, each individual
consciousness is utterly unique and totally inaccessible. You, Ian, cannot
ever feel what I feel inside, nor can any experiment test any theory about
what I feel, subjectivity is impenetrable. There is a boundary between "I"
and the rest of the universe, and this boundary is definite, not
indefinite. There really is something that gives coherency to the
subjective "I" and that something constructs a boundary between one quark
or bit of substance and the quark immediately next to it.

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Reilly Jones | Philosophy of Technology:
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