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Where does this mind store its memories and thoughts? If you were to ask this mind to answer that question (or it were to spontaneously put the question to its

Where does this mind store its memories and thoughts? If you were to ask this mind to answer that question (or it were to spontaneously put the question to itself, whether the auditory qualia is "your" voice or its own), what do you expect its answer would be?

skissane 5y ago
> Where does this mind store its memories and thoughts? Why do memories and thoughts require "storage"? Why would such a being think that they do? Even for us humans, if that question seems natural to us, it may be because our ideas about the mind have been heavily influenced by materialist/physicalist/computationalist assumptions, which people at other times in human history (and even people in radically different cultures today) would not necessarily share. If you asked an educated person in mediaeval Europe or classical antiquity "where are memories and thoughts stored", the majority would probably have objected that your question makes no sense: "Memories and thoughts are immaterial, only material objects can be 'stored' in containers" > If you were to ask this mind to answer that question (or it were to spontaneously put the question to itself, whether the auditory qualia is "your" voice or its own), what do you expect its answer would be? Since it has no idea of "space", why would it have any idea of "storage", or that memories and thoughts are or ought to be stored "somewhere"? Your question assumes the idea of space, when that is an idea it lacks.
- raattgift 5y ago
  My question does indeed assume the existence of space, and was meant to investigate your own thinking, because that is what interests me (you're obviously smart, but our backgrounds are very different), rather than some thoroughly-specified model. Are you going to stand firm on the claim that your disembodied's friend's answer to the question "where are your memories held?" is only ever going to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) ? I don't buy your claim that an educated (implying literate) person would not understand the idea of storage of information. Indeed, even less educated humans scratched out what we now call graffiti, or counting marks, on surfaces that have endured for millennia, or even longer (paleolithic cave art, petroglyphs, and so on). How do you help yourself remember some number of items that you need to account for? You write it down. Ancient Egyptians did that. > heavily influenced by materialist/physicalist/computationalist assumptions Guilty/guilty/guilty, sure. But I also have the dubious advantage of -- for abstruse reasons -- having worked with metric signature (++++...+), 1+1, and n+2 spacetimes, and know just how weird they are compared to the one we inhabit. So here I am stuck thinking of a brain that has some spatial extent but does not realize it, while avoiding pressing a claim that no remotely brain-like process can exist without at least two spatial dimensions. Brains that have some feature but don't realize it pop up in cosmology (and real life) with some aplomb. The most popular example from cosmology is Boltzmann brains, which exist only extremely momentarily, but have encoded within them false memories and perceptions. Keeping BBs from appearing practically everywhere in the universe turns out to strongly limit a number of features of the not-full-of-false-brains universe we appear to inhabit, if we also want to keep thermodynamics. Amusingly, Boltzmann brains are the opposite of what you are proposing: they have extent (and spatial structure) but vanishingly short duration. They can "remember" having an extensive dialogue with you in which they answer in great detail where their memories are kept, but the memory is false.
  - skissane 5y ago
    > I don't buy your claim that an educated (implying literate) person would not understand the idea of storage of information. I agree they'd understand we can store information in written documents, etc. But I don't see why they'd make the leap from information can be stored somewhere to all information must be stored somewhere. The later is a modern view rather than an ancient/mediaeval one. But, absent the belief that all information must be stored somewhere, my hypothetical disembodied mind has no reason to assume its own thoughts/memories/etc must be stored somewhere. > Keeping BBs from appearing practically everywhere in the universe turns out to strongly limit a number of features of the not-full-of-false-brains universe we appear to inhabit I think BB arguments are dubious, because they all involve disputable philosophical assumptions (about the nature of consciousness/etc). If you subtract those philosophical assumptions, BB arguments no longer work as justifications for rejecting those physics theories which produce "too many" BBs. Also: if combining a philosophical assumption with a scientific theory produces absurdity, why treat that as an argument against the scientific theory, when instead you could use it as an argument against the philosophical assumption?
    - raattgift 5y ago
      You can substitute Boltzmann pine trees or Boltzmann gold ingots for Boltzmann brains: the idea is that something of high complexity fluctuates into existence from a (vast! vaaaaassssssst!) thermal medium. The crucial point is that a small arbitrarily complex pattern repeated often is a lot more likely than a much larger pattern in which these smaller complex patterns evolve. In physical cosmology, the Boltzmann brains issue is: how can the sky full of many galaxies (in which solar systems form) instead of many many many more complicated things (automobiles? space probes?) that were not produced by the operation of processes within galaxies? Why isn't the sky full of gazillllions of space probes with nearly zero galaxies? Instead, in practically every direction we look, we see trillions of galaxies, and (at least for now) very few space probes. (That these galaxies may end up being populated with lots and lots of space probes eventually is the point.) We can coarsen and run into the same problem: why are stars organized in galaxies (and clusters of galaxies) rather than appearing randomly throughout the cosmos? The latter is much much much more likely in fluctuation theory. You can substitute a sparse cold non-self-interacting and generally non-interacting gas that occasionally condenses briefly into patterns that look like a small snowman, compared to much larger and more complicated patterns (perhaps whole armies of snowmen aligned rank-and-file) if you prefer not to think too hard about intermolecular and similar forces, and want to whittle down some your objections about how thought and memory might work. > my hypothetical disembodied mind has no reason to assume its own thoughts/memories/etc must be stored somewhere Which is why I asked you to imagine putting the idea to your friendly disembodied mind in order to get said mind to consider that and reply with its thoughts on the matter. Having been asked, it then has a reason to ponder (admittedly not assume) that its own thoughts/memories/etc must be stored somewhere.

skissane 5y ago

> Where does this mind store its memories and thoughts? Why do memories and thoughts require "storage"? Why would such a being think that they do? Even for us humans, if that question seems natural to us, it may be because our ideas about the mind have been heavily influenced by materialist/physicalist/computationalist assumptions, which people at other times in human history (and even people in radically different cultures today) would not necessarily share. If you asked an educated person in mediaeval Europe or classical antiquity "where are memories and thoughts stored", the majority would probably have objected that your question makes no sense: "Memories and thoughts are immaterial, only material objects can be 'stored' in containers" > If you were to ask this mind to answer that question (or it were to spontaneously put the question to itself, whether the auditory qualia is "your" voice or its own), what do you expect its answer would be? Since it has no idea of "space", why would it have any idea of "storage", or that memories and thoughts are or ought to be stored "somewhere"? Your question assumes the idea of space, when that is an idea it lacks.

raattgift 5y ago
My question does indeed assume the existence of space, and was meant to investigate your own thinking, because that is what interests me (you're obviously smart, but our backgrounds are very different), rather than some thoroughly-specified model. Are you going to stand firm on the claim that your disembodied's friend's answer to the question "where are your memories held?" is only ever going to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) ? I don't buy your claim that an educated (implying literate) person would not understand the idea of storage of information. Indeed, even less educated humans scratched out what we now call graffiti, or counting marks, on surfaces that have endured for millennia, or even longer (paleolithic cave art, petroglyphs, and so on). How do you help yourself remember some number of items that you need to account for? You write it down. Ancient Egyptians did that. > heavily influenced by materialist/physicalist/computationalist assumptions Guilty/guilty/guilty, sure. But I also have the dubious advantage of -- for abstruse reasons -- having worked with metric signature (++++...+), 1+1, and n+2 spacetimes, and know just how weird they are compared to the one we inhabit. So here I am stuck thinking of a brain that has some spatial extent but does not realize it, while avoiding pressing a claim that no remotely brain-like process can exist without at least two spatial dimensions. Brains that have some feature but don't realize it pop up in cosmology (and real life) with some aplomb. The most popular example from cosmology is Boltzmann brains, which exist only extremely momentarily, but have encoded within them false memories and perceptions. Keeping BBs from appearing practically everywhere in the universe turns out to strongly limit a number of features of the not-full-of-false-brains universe we appear to inhabit, if we also want to keep thermodynamics. Amusingly, Boltzmann brains are the opposite of what you are proposing: they have extent (and spatial structure) but vanishingly short duration. They can "remember" having an extensive dialogue with you in which they answer in great detail where their memories are kept, but the memory is false.
- skissane 5y ago
  > I don't buy your claim that an educated (implying literate) person would not understand the idea of storage of information. I agree they'd understand we can store information in written documents, etc. But I don't see why they'd make the leap from information can be stored somewhere to all information must be stored somewhere. The later is a modern view rather than an ancient/mediaeval one. But, absent the belief that all information must be stored somewhere, my hypothetical disembodied mind has no reason to assume its own thoughts/memories/etc must be stored somewhere. > Keeping BBs from appearing practically everywhere in the universe turns out to strongly limit a number of features of the not-full-of-false-brains universe we appear to inhabit I think BB arguments are dubious, because they all involve disputable philosophical assumptions (about the nature of consciousness/etc). If you subtract those philosophical assumptions, BB arguments no longer work as justifications for rejecting those physics theories which produce "too many" BBs. Also: if combining a philosophical assumption with a scientific theory produces absurdity, why treat that as an argument against the scientific theory, when instead you could use it as an argument against the philosophical assumption?
  - raattgift 5y ago
    You can substitute Boltzmann pine trees or Boltzmann gold ingots for Boltzmann brains: the idea is that something of high complexity fluctuates into existence from a (vast! vaaaaassssssst!) thermal medium. The crucial point is that a small arbitrarily complex pattern repeated often is a lot more likely than a much larger pattern in which these smaller complex patterns evolve. In physical cosmology, the Boltzmann brains issue is: how can the sky full of many galaxies (in which solar systems form) instead of many many many more complicated things (automobiles? space probes?) that were not produced by the operation of processes within galaxies? Why isn't the sky full of gazillllions of space probes with nearly zero galaxies? Instead, in practically every direction we look, we see trillions of galaxies, and (at least for now) very few space probes. (That these galaxies may end up being populated with lots and lots of space probes eventually is the point.) We can coarsen and run into the same problem: why are stars organized in galaxies (and clusters of galaxies) rather than appearing randomly throughout the cosmos? The latter is much much much more likely in fluctuation theory. You can substitute a sparse cold non-self-interacting and generally non-interacting gas that occasionally condenses briefly into patterns that look like a small snowman, compared to much larger and more complicated patterns (perhaps whole armies of snowmen aligned rank-and-file) if you prefer not to think too hard about intermolecular and similar forces, and want to whittle down some your objections about how thought and memory might work. > my hypothetical disembodied mind has no reason to assume its own thoughts/memories/etc must be stored somewhere Which is why I asked you to imagine putting the idea to your friendly disembodied mind in order to get said mind to consider that and reply with its thoughts on the matter. Having been asked, it then has a reason to ponder (admittedly not assume) that its own thoughts/memories/etc must be stored somewhere.