X-Message-Number: 7932 From: Peter Merel <> Subject: Cramer, Tao & Self Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 08:46:14 +1000 (EST) Robert Ettinger writes, >1. Peter Merel (#7911) mentions "Cramer's transactional interpretation" [of >quantum mechanics]. Peter, could you provide a reference? Certainly: Cramer has both his "Reviews of Modern Physics" and "International Journal of Theoretical Physics" papers online, as well as a good general introduction that was published in his column in "Analog". The first two are linked to from the last, so you might start at "http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw16.html". >2. On "Taoist notion of identity": It does not seem at all mystical, but-- I'll remind you you said that before we're done :-) >Certainly my mind uses and interprets symbols to interpret the world, with >the senses as intermediaries. The only things I can experience directly are >the qualia in my self circuit. That's already quite different to the taoist idea, which is that the differentiated world exists only as things and qualia in the mind; the taoist notion of reality is where its mysticism resides. If you've ever seen Escher's "The Print Gallery" (http://www.netspot.unisa.edu.au/wm/paint/auth/escher/other/escher.print-gallery.jpg) you'll see a pretty rendering of the taoist notion of reality ("the Way") - it's under his signature. Even "The Way" is only an abstraction of whatever the mysterious thing is that is beneath abstraction; like Escher's signature, it's a patch that you can use to cover a hole in the world. Beneath the patch there is only, and there can only ever be, mystery. So the taoist idea of identity has it that the self is no more or less than any other thing in the world of abstraction; just like Escher's gallery-observer, it's not necessary for experience. A taoist way of dissolving the self, in contrast the the zenist methods, is to accept more and more things as oneself, until the whole world is the self. Since you can do that, what sense is there in abstracting one or another form of experience as "the self circuit"? >First, it glides past the crucial distinction between symbol manipulation and >feeling, more or less implying that the computing part of the brain needs >nothing more than raw sensory data to generate qualia--whereas, it seems >certain to me, it needs a specific feature of anatomy/physiology to provide >subjectivity, which I have called the self circuit. What is this distinction? What's the difference between "raw sensory data" and "qualia"? I know that you maintain the self-circuit implements the difference, but I don't understand what the difference means to you in the first place. Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7932