[ExI] Continuity of experience.

[John Clark]

On Mar 7, 2010, Spencer Campbell wrote:
> 
> you are proud to point to examples of a thing which you can't define.

Yes.

> I don't see the logic.

Examples are much more important and much more fundamental than definitions, it's where we get the information to make our definitions after all, assuming we even have one that's worth a damn; most people have not even opened a dictionary since their fourth grade teacher made them and yet they manage to communicate just fine. When we were infants we learned our native language from examples not by memorizing a lot of grammatical rules and definitions.     

> If I realized that I was recognizing a phenomenon that I don't know how to describe, I, personally, would feel pretty strongly compelled to work on articulating it.

Articulate it with words, all of which are defined in a dictionary with more words that are also defined with yet more words, and round and round we go. This is the point Gordon Swobe has been repeating over and over and over again in his thread (by the way congratulations Gordon, you just reached your 3 month anniversary), but human beings must have managed to break out of this logical dead end, otherwise Evolution would not have allowed us to survive, and they did it by means of examples. They pointed to something in the real world and then they pointed to a squiggle they had just written and their children understood the connection.   

> I'm disagreeing with an implication, here.
> I believe "A" and I believe "not B". Therefore, I believe "if A then
> B" is a false statement.

No, from the above you don't have nearly enough information to make that logical jump. If you believe in "not B" then you BELIEVE B is false and A has nothing to do with it; but as to the actual truth or falsehood of B there is no way to know.

You said:

>>> if mind scanning does not preserve objective continuity, then there must necessarily be a preferred rate of change in the universe.

I agree with that statement entirely. Then you said 

>>>  I accept unconditionally that there is no preferred rate of change in the universe

I agree with that statement too. From that the only logical conclusion is that the statement "mind scanning does not preserve objective continuity" is false. If "A then B" is true then "not B then not A" is also true.

And I still don't understand why I should give a tinker's damn if objective continuity is preserved or not.

 John K Clark


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100308/937bede2/attachment.html>