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#1 Kalepha

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Posted 09 June 2005 - 12:58 AM


Suppose on a hypothetical two-level hierarchy of minds, on terms of predictive power and open-ended freedom, you’re on the bottom and others are on the top. Minds on the top level can predict everything you do, and this ensures that your freedom is never open-ended relative to them, while theirs is open-ended. Suppose you don’t know with certainty that you’re on this bottom level but yet still value being, or the potential for being, at the forefront of knowledge acquisition and creation, with reference to all reality.

Is your life still meaningful?

#2 Lazarus Long

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Posted 09 June 2005 - 02:28 AM

Nate is this a carry over form our aside into FW&D?

If so you may want to follow up on what Don found about Thomas Metzinger. It is kind of interesting but it likely won't make you feel better (at least at first). It will however address some of the assumptions you are making.

One reason I suggest that hard determinism is wrong is that the universe appears to be probabilistic down to a subatomic level. There are clear *trends* or higher order probabilities but there is also an element of chaos. These conditions exist across a kind of asymptotic relationship of proximity and dependence from certainty to impossibility and never quite reach, but instead infinitely approach one extreme or another for any given set of conditions.

I counter the Free Will argument the same way. There exists a sort of mirror image of that asymptote predicated on a variety of factors that grant the will a form of intentional expression within *limits* the restrictions of which define choice. But choice is never a single option, and within the range of possibility there are not simply better and worse options but also the chaotic alternative of synthetic or intuitive *invention* for choice.

Being No One:
The Self-model Theory of Subjectivity 2004-01-30

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as "selves" exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model". In "Being No One", Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is.


BTW folks I find some of this intriguingly consistent but a bit too Buddhist or [:o] existentialist for the average American and westerner. I doubt telling people they are *self less* is going to carry enough memetic weight to overcome their fixation with self interest. :))

More on the *intentionality relation* BTW nice find Don, and yes it is appropriate.
What makes a phenomenal state a subjective state?
http://cleamara18.vu...4/Metzinger.pdf


Book Review - Being No One, by Thomas Metzinger
MIT Press, 2002 Review by Kenneth Einar Himma, May 25th 2003


BTW Don and Nate I can see that this leads directly back to what I have been arguing about self identification with an external model of a spiritual soul versus a biological model of the mind. I can also see that that the reasons for choosing intention over potential are strong, but dangerously dissatisfying politically.

However it should be possible to rephrase the arguments in more socially palatable terms. It might help Don if you didn't seem so eager to suggest such Hobbsean examples sometimes. [g:)]

the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR), which provides a functionalist model of the experienced subject-object relation that forms the basis for the perspectival dimension of self.  A PMIR depicts a relationship between the system, which is transparently represented to itself, and some (possibly internal) object in the world.  For example, the PMIR currently operative in your body would depict, among other things, your state of being someone who is currently reading a review of Metzinger's book.


I am not really side tracking you Nate. If you look at the example you've chosen to evaluate, you are presuming a tiered model and that sets up your relationship of self with respect to other selves in a manner that presumes the competitive evolutionary model.

Metzinger is suggesting there may be a sort of a step up from that relationship to a toward a more objective relation. Meaningfulness for individual life then goes beyond self relational and then acquires a potentially higher meaning.

This could be dangerously altruistic [!:)]

#3 th3hegem0n

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Posted 09 June 2005 - 03:25 AM

Is your life still meaningful?


Well that depends on how you define meaningful.

Will you feel like you lead a meaninful life if you know everything you do or will do has already been predicted? i don't know, go ask a christian. i always found this concept amusing as a child. if god knows everything, he already knows everything i will do. it actually kind of pissed me off, because if he's so nice and all knowing why doesn't he give me some help?

i would say 'meaningfulness' derives from acheiving some goal you value. if you acheive the goal then you have done something meaningful. so i would say that the meaninfulness of your life derives from the acheivement of all the goals you value. or some annoyingly fuzzy concept related to that.

in fact, basically what you are saying is that the goals of the bottoms are restricted to the goals of the tops. the tops would never let the bottoms have any desire for anything outside the goal-space of the tops desires. thus, if you value 'being at the forefront,' in other words, being just as good as the tops (by that i mean the tops basically are all-knowing gods, and if you want to 'be at the forefront' then you have to be an all-knowing god as well), then with respect to the goal of 'being at the forefront,' your "life" is not meaninful as long as the tops disallow you from doing that.

so the 'meaningfulness of your life' - (based on all those ideas explicity said above, not any of the ones someone might arbitrarily assume) depends directly on whether the tops allow the potential for the bottoms to become tops.

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