[extropy-chat] Let's try this again.

[John K Clark]

"Heartland" <velvet977 at hotmail.com>

> Oh, come on.  You call them "specific points?"

I do indeed call them specific points, or at least as specific as it is
possible to get with a theory full of fuzzy logic gaping holes and
tautologies, like the copy is the copy, and A=A and B=B and G=G and F=F.

> I explain everything here:
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2006-May/026758.html

You can't imagine the excitement I felt when I read these words, at last I'm
going to learn the secrets of the universe. Instead I find you pointed to a
tired old post I already read where you inform us with great fanfare that
matter exists in *time* and *space* as if nobody had ever thought that
before. It is also where you define mind as something that produces mind,
and where you insist mind is a 4D object but dodge for the ninetieth time my
request to supply the 4D coordinates of various parts of it, and where you
say "A new instance of that subjective experience is verifiably different
from the old one" but forget to say how it is verified or by who.

> Atoms alone are not what makes us unique.

That makes perfect sense, provided of course you don't require that theories
be consistent. You said "Identity of an object - Unique trajectory of the
object in time and space" but the trouble is objects are made of atoms and
atoms are what makes your beloved trajectories.

> If I throw a ball from point A at time t1 to point B at time t2 and write
> down in the notebook "(A,t1) to (B,t2)" and then destroy the ball, will
> the entry in the notebook erase itself too? Was *that* proven in the lab?

As I've explained before if I throw that ball into a pile of 6.02 * 10^23
identical balls and it is imposable even in theory to tell which ball is
which your written record is absolutely positively 100% useless.

> Do you even know what A means in your question?

It doesn't matter what A means because I concede you are right. Whatever
their faults tautologies do have the virtue of being correct, A is indeed
equal to A.

Me:
> >Mr. Heartland never explains the position relative to what

You:
> Easy, a location relative to the other instance under consideration

Then you could never say an exact copy is or is not you because the truth is
a continuum that depends on the observer. You are standing one foot from
your exact copy, to a microbe 6 inches away the two of you are a huge
distance apart so you must be very different people, to an observer in the
Comma Cluster 8 billion light years away the two of you are in virtually
identical positions so you must be virtually identical people. And you still
haven't explained if position is so damn important to mind why mind by
itself can't even figure out where it is.

> Abstract concepts are not made of matter.

Certainly true, abstract concepts like mind are not made of matter although
some of them describe what matter does.

> They are not things that "constitute mind."

Don't be ridiculous, memory and the emotion of love and logic and the
sensation of the color orange are all parts of mind, if mind is a 4D object
like you say it's not too much to ask for their coordinates, but you can't
supply them.

> You're confusing abstract concepts with a real processes.

Many abstract concepts, like large and small and few and many are just as
real as atoms, and some abstract concepts, like pain and consciousness, seem
a lot more real than atoms to us; and the important thing, at least in this
discussion, is not what is but what seems to be, because subjectivity always
has priority over objectivity.

> Different locations, different instances. Is that really so hard to
> understand?

It's not difficult to understand, it's IMPOSABLE to understand unless the
word "instances" means nothing. When two calculators add 2 and 2 the result
is the exact same 4, not a different instance, not a different type, not a
different anything, it's just 4.

 > you are confusing matterless and dimensionless concepts

Like numbers, symphonies, many adjectives verbs and adverbs, and the human
mind.

> with the ones that require matter and dimensions.

Like bricks and the human brain, and I don't see anything confusing about
it.

  John K Clark