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Structured discussion
"Everybody knows that something is impossible to realize
till someone inexperienced comes and invents it."
(Albert Einstein)
A reductionist view of Open Individualism
Iacopo Vettori – Last update: April,
16 2011
0.Note
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1. The three theories about
personal identity and the actor paradigm
1.1 To explain simply the three
theories of personal identity, and to understand clearly the reflections proposed
comparing them, it’s useful to refer to the actor paradigm, according with every
person can be imagined as a mask or a persona interpreted by an actor, and the life
may be compared to the time that each character spend on the stage. This model
was used in the past by writers as Pirandello to describe the mystery of who we
really are behind our conventional mask, but the use proposed now is quite different,
because Pirandello meant to refer to our subconscious world, and here we mean to
the personal identity. The dualist thinkers may identify the actor with the soul
or another abstract equivalent, and reductionist thinkers may think to what generally
is presumed to be preserved even after a complete memory loss. Reductionists could
be annoyed by this example, but along our
discussion, we will see how this apparent dualism can be resolved, and is used here just to support the explanation of the different personal
identity views.
1.2 Using this model, we can define in a quite simple
way the three main theories of personal identity, as they were classified by Daniel
Kolak in his book “I am You”. The traditional theory, according with our personal
identity has the same duration of our whole life, is named “Closed Individualism”,
or “Closed individual view of personal identity” , and may be described with the
actor model saying that to each mask or character corresponds one and only one actor,
from his entering to his leaving the stage. Some thinkers having a radical view
of reductionism assert that is required that during lifetime must succeed more different
actors to play the same character, because the mask undergo some little but continuous
changes during the representation, so it must be consider as a succession of many
different masks, that require a parallel succession of many different actors. These
changes should happen in
imperceptible way, but at a quite high frequency. This theory is named by Kolak
as “Empty Individualism”, or “Empty
individual view of personal identity”, to suggest that the progressive chopping
of personal identity, taken to its extreme implies the complete loss of a subject
who can claim the continuity of its existence, which would be just an illusion.
The third theory, promoted by Kolak in his book, is what he called "Open Individualism”,
or "Open individual view of personal identity", whose origins can be traced back
to the Indian Vedas and to Aristotle in the West, through the monopsychism of Averroes
and Siger of Brabant, and recently rediscovered by scientists such as Erwin Schrodinger.
According to this theory, there is only one actor playing all the characters on
stage. We can easily imagine that this could be done in a movie with an accurate
editing, but it seems impossible that it could be done in a theatre, in a scene
in which the actors are even free to improvise without following any script. What
we will try to show is that not only these difficulties do not prejudice that model,
but that it is able to provide better answers to many classic existential problems,
using the particular interpretation that we propose, trying to remain layman and
reductionist.
1.3 Assuming that only one actor
exists, raises the question about "who" it may be. However, it should be noted firstly
that from a certain point of view this does not introduce a new problem that the
alternative hypotheses have not. In any case, we can ask "who" we really are, beyond
the veil of appearances and we adopt the conventional form in social life. But it
seems that as long as we maintain a correspondence between an actor and a single
mask, the response to the question "who the actor is?" might be resolved with the
same answer of "how the mask is made", while the existence of a single actor seemed
to be something more that is not required, because of which should be required to
adopt a dualistic metaphysics. But if we consider it deeper, if the actor is reduced
to be only one, we can interpret it in a completely impersonal way, as the phenomenon
of consciousness itself, the faculty to recognize or assign a meaning to all incoming
signals within the brain, the ability to recognize ourselves as living subjects
and differentiated from the rest of the world. We could reverse the argument and
say that are the two theories of the Empty Individualism and the Closed Individualism
that introduce a different identity for each experience of consciousness, without
any real necessity, relying solely on the numerical difference of living structures
in which it can express itself. Reducing the actor to one allows to ignore its identity
and to consider the consciousness in a conceptual framework similar to what we use
for time and space. As there is no absolute time and space, but they can only be
measured in the presence of a material structure that changes over time, so the
consciousness too can be considered not as an absolute metaphysical entity, but
as something that emerges only in the presence of an appropriate physical structure.
Even this is not a news, because it is the same thing addressed by the classical
reductionist view, where the consciousness emerges in every brain that is sufficiently
complex. The only difference is that it assumes that, because every time consciousness
arises in different circumstances, it must necessarily have a numerically different
identity, i.e. (according to my informal language), the actor who plays each new
character must necessarily be a new actor, while according to Open Individualism,
the actor is always the same, even if he or she doesn’t know it. This correspondence
shows that cannot exist any physical evidences in favor of a view or another, because
in every case the outward appearance and the individual experience would remain
the same.
2.Personal identity problems with the traditional reductionism
2.1 Within the reductionist view
of the Closed Individualism, there are some unresolved problems, and notwithstanding it is generally
adopted by philosophers and scientists, doesn’t exist a majority of them that have
the same view on some details. According the traditional reductionism, which I too
subscribed for about thirty years, everything can be reduced to something having
a physical existence. Rather than to
material structures, we should refer to informational structures, or even better,
to continuous processes of transformation of informational
structures. The problem (which has been recognized not only by Kolak but also by
Parfit and other philosophers) is that when we rely on the "continuity" of a material
structure that constantly change, we are conceptually adopting a form of dualism.
If, as we know, our bodies are continuously changing both the material particles
and the physical structure (and the logical structure that represents information
in our brain), after a sufficiently long time and sufficiently drastic changes (total
amnesia, or personality change, or folly, or just the years passing), it is possible
that does not remain anything physical or logical to testify the continuity of the
history of an individual, to keep track of "who he was" based on "who he is currently".
Appealing to the "continuity of gradual changes" means to imagine the existence
of something that has the role of the "placeholder" not physically detectable. This
is dualism. The only way to avoid the introduction of this placeholder, if we want
deny the Open Individualism, it is to break even the during of a single life in
a succession of multiple individual identities, so that we can say that every identity
is defined exactly by the physical structure that generates it. That’s what exactly
does the Empty Individualism view of personal identity.
2.2 What its duration would be?
It can vary from a single moment of Plank, if we want to be very stringent, or it
can reach the duration of what we consider "an instant", which could be around half
a second, the estimated time of the evolution of our thinking. If we want to force it to stretch to a whole life, there is the problem
that in this case my current identity also depends on what I will do in the future.
I can imagine the whole process that represents my entire life like a static structure
that extends along the time, and I can make a unique association between my personal
identity and a precise physical structure, but this is against the common view of
quantum mechanics, according with our knowledge of events have some unavoidable
boundaries of indetermination, and particles don’t have any own state until they
are undertaken to some measurement. This stretching in the duration of the personal
identity, it would be necessary to accept the idea of super-determinism, according
with also each future choice of the experimenter is already expected in the same
moment in which a physical event must have some outcome, that would be selected
to fit that future choice. This is a challenging assumption, but it remains a viable
option.
2.3 We could think that Open Individualism
as well would require super-determinism, though for a different reason. Closed Individualism
require it to define the personal identity of a subject, so that it can be considered constant for a whole lifetime. Open Individualism
doesn’t have this need. But when we imagine a single actor that plays all the roles
on the stage, we cannot understand how not just how he could be present simultaneously
behind more masks, but imagining the editing of a movie, we have to think that he
could improvise just while playing the first character recorded, but then, recording
the part of other characters, he should necessarily behave in a coherent fashion
with the previous recorded ones. This seems to deny the possibility of a real improvisation.
However, this problem depends by the limits of the actor paradigm and by our conception
of the time. If the time and the space are considered just as the stage of the representation,
and we believe that out of the stage doesn’t exist anything, nor space, nor time,
nor any form of consciousness, then we can guess that, even if the subjective experience
of the actor is to play each single character without any break, we have not any
“absolute time” within which we could sort the different interpretations of all
the characters. The only clock that exist is the one on the stage, and its time
is relative to the sequence of the represented events. Each single decision of the
actor that plays all the roles can be related only with the clock on the stage,
and its consequences propagates themselves only forward from it. What matters to
preserve the free will possibility, is that at the moment of each decision of each
character, even if partially influenced by the events already happened, he or she
could have a minimal discretion to choose an action that however propagates its
consequences only in the relative future of the representation.
This and other consideration about the nature of representations will be
better explained in the last part of this paper.
2.4 Comparing with the traditional
reductionism, the biggest difficulty that Open Individualism must face is the requirement
that the actor must be present on the stage playing simultaneously more than one
role, i.e. the not-locality of the actor. This seems to be a insurmountable difficulty,
and probably is the mean reason why the traditional reductionism and the majority
of all the other metaphysical views presuppose that each living being had its own
individual personal identity, different from any other. If we think indeed to the
Arabian Phoenix myth, we can see that
the fact of considering it being always the same at each its new birth hinges crucially
by the fact that its successive lives don’t overlaps even for a second. But if we
consider carefully the traditional reductionist view, we found that even within
it we must face the same problem. In fact, if we imagine any living being like a
particular information structure, we must decide how to evaluate the identity of
an eventual replica. Although the existence of a perfect replica seems impossible,
at the very moment that you consider a living being as an information structure,
you must accept this theoretical possibility. You can be tempted to expand the conditions
necessary to establish your identity to comprehend all the information existing
at the time of your birth, but this moves the problem instead of solving it, unless
supposing that were necessary to take infinite information, but this seems a presumption
quite unscientific, considering that our observable horizon is about 13,7 billion
of light year in radius. The possibility of the existence of replicas break down
the correspondence between an actor and a character for the traditional reductionist
view. If we assume that the two replicated characters are still interpreted by the
same actor, we are accepting the possibility of non-locality. If we assume that
the two replicas should be considered as two identical characters played by two
different actors, the reductionism is lost, because we have to introduce an abstract
placeholder of identity that allows us to distinguish the two structures of identical
information. At this point, it seems necessary to choose between the allowance of
non-locality or the loss of the reductionism.
2.5 If you choose to allow non-locality,
you must be aware that you are subscribing that doesn’t really matter the physical
instantiation of a brain to determine the personal identity, but just its logical
structure. Whenever two physical structure represent the same brain, they have the
same personal identity. This is a fundamental step toward Open Individualism, because
we can then consider that perhaps not all the brain structure really matter for
personal identity, but just some particular substructure, as we can figure also
considering the brain of the same person in two different moments. Why do not consider
then that that logical substructure could be the minimal logical structure that
allows the phenomenon of consciousness? If we can accept this idea, we really are
accepting Open Individualism, at least in the reductionist version that I am promoting.
This argument is important and it will be deepened later.
If you prefer to loss the reductionism, you have to face another big problem. In
this case, the existence of an actor cannot be linked to the existence of a character,
because the same character is eligible to be interpreted by any actor, and we lose
the only thing that allowed to distinguish all these actors. In this way, it become
impossible to find a way to list all the possible actors, because neither a non-terminating
procedure could guarantee that every possible actor will be listed in a finite time. Also this argument
will be explained better in what follows, to understand the bigger logical difficulties
that implies, without being able to solve
the existentialist problem that will be discussed next.
2.6 One of the misunderstandings
to be clarified is retaining that the only actor in the model of Open Individualism
should to be recognized in some way to being able to establish its uniqueness. This
requirement is related only to our preconceptions about the identity which it is
difficult not to be influenced by. Even asking the question about why precisely
my “I” was destined to play also "everybody else", betrays the same difficulty,
but it has no reason to exist. The problem is that this conception also prevents
to see how Open Individualism can be categorized in its own right as a reductionist
theory. Someone might imagine that it always requires a "spirit" able to transmigrate
from one life to another, or split itself into several parts that then could meet
again in a cosmic unity. This vision can be suggestive, but are not necessary, and
even if you are willing to accept them, it is important to understand that the vision
that I propose in this paper is a very reductionist view. You can realize it considering
the "placeholder identity" that I mentioned to highlight the difficulties of the
traditional theory of Closed Individualism. If any living being can be described
by an information structure, a dualist theory must add an additional information
that allows to recognize its personal identity. Reductionist theories deny the necessity
of this additional information, because they explain life, consciousness and personal
identity in purely physical terms. But to imagine that Open Individualism, to allow
sharing of personal identity, required the existence of such additional information
that must always contain the same data, just to be able to check that identity,
is an assumption totally unnecessary. Such information is needed only if we assume
that it could be different in some circumstances. If you posits that it is always
the same, add it to the description of every living being does not add any information
at all. The same hypothetical content of such information would be irrelevant. You
might think of using it as a data field that can assume the values “true” or “false”,
to distinguish the living structures from the non-living ones. But according to
the reductionist logic that we want to apply, the fact that a structure can be considered
"living" or "conscious" can in principle be deduced from its physical description,
although the debate is currently open on what criteria should be used. This means
that the additional data with the value "true" or "false" would be superfluous,
because it could be inferred from other data that describe the logical structure.
Being able to do without this hypothetical additional data with content that is
always the same shows that this conception of Open Individualism is a reductionist
conception.
2.7 I hope to have shown quite
clearly that considering each possibility, at some point come out problematic and
counterintuitive implications, not less problematic than those assumed by Open Individualism.
In the end, the most general model that we can image is an universe (or a multiverse)
that contains every other possibility. If you accept Open Individualism, you just
have to notice that the multiverse itself is able to generate awareness, though
each time it is limited and partial, depending on the context in which it emerges.
If you do not accept Open Individualism, you have to introduce more instances of
awareness and inevitably occurs what I call "the existential problem individual",
without any theoretical gain respect to the argument of Open Individualism on issues
such as personal identity, not-locality, reductionism, free will.
3.The anthropic principle and the individual existential
problem
3.1 I cannot say if somebody
introduced before the distinction between "individual existential problem" and "general
existential problem", but I think it is an useful distinction anyway.
Individual existential problem:
"What conditions were necessary for my existence? What chance they had to come true?
Could I not exist? Could the world exist without me?"
General existential problem:
'What conditions were necessary for the emergence of life? What chance they had
to come true? Could life not exist? Could the world exist without life?"
An anthropic kind of reasoning
allows us to break free from both the questions "what chances they had to come true?",
because it let us presume that, given enough space and time, every possible case
has its chance to come true. But when we apply this reasoning to the case of individual
existential problem, we are implicitly presuming that I born and I am alive each
time is created the information structure that represents me. But then, in the case
of the traditional reductionist theory, you cannot think to live just one life and
nothing more forever. We must think to be in a loop where we live infinite times
our current life, or at least a life that begins always in the same start conditions.
If you are the only possible actor for your mask or character, you have to come
in the stage each time your character / mask appears. To think that this is a possibility
that can be given just only once is against every probability theory. To presume
it, we should think about an universe delimited in space and time with rules that
undermine the concept itself of “event that happens only once”. These consideration
will be deepened in the last part of this paper.
3.2 According this view, the existence
of your mind will be not associated to a particular physical brain, but to the intere
class of brains that have a logical structure identical to yours. Moreover, if you
do not adhere to an extreme version of Empty Individualism, for which the existence
of each actor is reduced to a single snapshot of a such short duration that the
brain can be considered unchanged, we should concede that this class of brain doesn’t
contain only brains identical in each single molecule, but brains “identical enough”,
that have in common only a part of their logic structure. Once we saw that the problem
of non-locality is also present with the reductionist version of Closed Individualism
and Empty Individualism, and that there can be no evidence which can prove true
or false any of these theories, it is shown that Open Individualism doesn’t need
any presumption that is not already necessary anyway. There is another consideration
that we must keep in mind.
3.3 As we saw, even for reductionist
theories it’s not important the matter that physically constitutes the structure,
but just its logic. The personal identity then is not associated to some set of
particles, but to the geometry of their structure. So, according the reductionist
kind of Closed Individualism or Empty Individualism, a particular personal identity
must be not considered linked to a single copy of that logical structure, but at
each physical copy of the same logic structure, i.e. to the entire class of physical
structures defined by the logical structure that they have in common. Certainly
it must be something of more complex than a single molecule of DNA, it should be
a cerebral structure that perhaps doesn’t have a recognizable physical representation.
But whatever theory on personal identity we want to adopt, the same considerations
can be applied also to the consciousness phenomenon. As for personal identity, we
can presuppose that the consciousness
phenomenon too depends by an information structure
complex enough. Actually, this
is the widespread opinion of scholars, though almost certainly it is a logical structure
that could be physically realized in many different ways, but that every conscious
being have in common. So the logical structure of consciousness would define a class
of physical structure that have in common the property of being conscious.
3.4 But we
saw that according with the traditional view of reductionism, the personal identity
must be defined by a logical structure
as well, and then to distinguish two living beings with different personal identity,
it is necessary to imagine that in both their brains were present the same logical structure that represent the consciousness,
but to make it work, it would be necessarily integrated by other different structures with the fundamental role of differentiating
between the two personal identities. Even if certainly a brain to work properly
must have many other accessory structures than the one that represent the consciousness,
in this way we are introducing the need of a structure dedicated specifically to
the definition of the personal identity, that must integrate the one of the consciousness,
that is the same for all the sentient beings. Open Individualism doesn’t need
such supplementary structure. The same brain logic structure needed to generate
the consciousness, is the very same logic structure that defines personal identity.
Because this structure is the same for each living brain, the personal identity
of the emerged consciousness is always the same as well. All the other parts of the brain are still necessary, to be able to receive,
store and elaborate the input information: all of this is what makes us different
each other, but nothing of this is fundamental to preserve our personal identity.
Daniel Kolak, in his book “I am You”, discusses in details how to overcome each
of these apparent boundaries.
3.5 In the case of dualist theories,
the question about the probability of our personal existence doesn’t allow any answer. Havin forever lost the correspondence
between physical world and mental world, for each possible mask, there could be
an infinite number of possible actors, each indistinguishable
from others, and for
this impossibility to distinguish them, their total number should be an infinite more than numerable. That means that it shoud be possible to create infinite perfectly
identical clones, without any warrant that sooner or later a particular given “soul”
will be associated to one of them. Even if we take as a fact to be one of the uncountable
souls theoretically possible, the
chance to born would be equal to that of extracting an integer number from the set
of the real numbers. Mathematically, that chance is zero. Neither an omnipotent God could choose your single soul. To choose you,
it is necessary that you already exist in the God’s mind. This model implies that
you were from the beginning one of the possible choices of God, and then you had
nothing to do but to wait for your turn to be chosen. But to presume to be forever
a possibility in the God’s mind, before having any chance to deserve such a privilege,
would be again a condition to take as a fact without any possible rational explication,
that leads to a presumption very well hidden but also very large.
3.6 The same considerations
also apply in the case of dualistic secular theories. Even replacing God wth the
fate or some hypothetical (meta)physics laws that govern the emergence of mind in
a brain in formation, we cannot eliminate this conceptual "set of all possible minds"
of which we must assume to be a part without any rational reason. The only evidence
that we are part of it is our own existence, which is the only fact that we cannot
deny. It forces us to infer that our presence in the collection of "all possible
minds" was inevitable, but on the other hand, since these abstract minds don’t have
any character that could distinguish them, none of them appears to be essential,
as each of them can theoretically be replaced by another one without any difference
to the physical world we experience. This "non-indispensability" is in contradiction
with the fact that my very existence shows me that for some reason I was still found
to be necessary. The fact that the set of "all the possible minds" can contain an
infinite number of elements of a different cardinality than the number of items
in the collection of "all the possible logical structures", carries us to the added
difficulty that each element could be deleted without that its absence could be
detected in some way. The reason is that the logical structures can be compared
to each other, recognized and enumerated, but this is not possible between the elements
of "all the possible minds". However, in addition to this difficulty, even for the
dualist theories remains the same issue we already saw for the reductionist theories,
for which we must consider ourselves owners of a definite logical structure (or
a clearly identified "core") within the “set of all the possible logical structures
that allow conscience" (or "of all the possible souls"). And in any case, the simple
fact that there exist other members of the same set that are different from me,
forces me to consider that even the element that I find myself to be, could also
be of "one of the others", leaving my consciousness out of the game of life.
3.7 Although this seems to
be a kind of dualistic view, it cannot be avoided with the simplistic reductionist
claim “every other one was necessarily different from you, and therefore you were
necessary”. A reductionist philosophy cannot deny the existence of a mind that reflects
about the outside world and about itself: rather, the reductionism justifies its
existence by reducing it to a mere physical phenomenon, that is, denying the existence
of a special "quintessence" which it could be formed by. So again, I can legitimately
wonder that my mind was destined to emerge from a structure capable of generating
a logical mind, whatever it is. I am not amazed to be a mind originated just from
the specific logical structure that represents my physical brain: I'm wondering,
more generally, of being me too a mind that is part of this game of life. The fact
that for Closed or Empty Individualism there are other minds that are not mine,
whenever you want to consider them in a dualist or reductionist way, cannot in any
way to account for the fact that "even I" am part of this game. This is the paradox
at the heart of the individual existential problem.
3.8 Because of this uniqueness
of the actor that plays every role, Open Individualism can solve the individual
existential problem, making it coincide with the general existential problem. Any
alternative theory will always leave the question open, because you have to accept
as a fact, proven only by your own experience, that you had been given an opportunity
within a universe or a multiverse in which every other possibility is represented
by someone else. You have to accept
as "given from above" being a participant of this game, an actor with a fixed mask
in this play, who has been assigned a character exclusively, and to assume that
it couldn’t be assigned to any other actor. This appears to me far more presumptuous
than thinking to be the only possible actor. I cannot avoid to consider it as an
inexplicable privilege, because the simple consideration
that there exist “other persons that are not me”, it’s just what force me to consider
that the information structure that represent my person could be another “other
person”, that there’s no rational reason of the fact that me too belong to this
set of “other persons”, that could be well exist without me, leaving me in the nonexistence for the whole eternity.
Eliminating from the fundamentals the possibility of the
existence of any possible "other", Open Individualism eliminates the problem of "being
one of the many". It may seem a more presumptuous assumption, but if you consider
carefully, you can realize that instead it is the only way to avoid any presumption,
because it eliminates any difference between you and every other living being. This
is why I think that Open Individualism, at least in the version that I subscribe,
is even more "atheistic" and "reductionist" view than the traditional reductionism.
3.9 Certainly, is always possible
to think that doesn’t exist any rational solution, and we are destined to remain
in the mystery forever. But the reasons that I exposed should evidence that not
only one solution is available, but that its rejection implies the presumption to
be the exclusive holder of a particular life form, without any possibility of a
rational explication of such a privilege. Probably, who is reading this
document had a good education, perhaps owns a computer, doesn’t have the problem
of obtaining food every day, so is in a position for which would be absolutely convenient
to be the “exclusive holder” of that unique life that, as we saw, he or she should
be called to live again each time its occasion happened, but many other people who
didn’t had the same lucky should be less prevented to accept this solution, even
if it is in contrast with the intuition of personal identity that we developed in
millions of years of evolution. It was actually a necessary delusion to make the
evolution work. But if you review the logical steps that I exposed, you’ll find
that Open Individualism is the only possible rational solution. Somebody
should suppose that one day could come an alternative explication that today we
cannot have. But if it were possible, it would mean that someday somebody could
say: "I can demonstrate that behind that mask must necessary be that actor". Can
we really think that somebody could ever define who is the actor behind the mask?
Even behind our own mask?
4.All the possible universes and the general existential
problem
4.1 What follows should be
interpreted as a free speculation on how it could be dealt with the "general existential
problem”. The model of the universe or multiverse which may complete this world
view, corresponds without any restriction to the four-level multiverse described
by cosmologist Max Tegmark. In short, it provides that there may be all the universes
that correspond to any mathematical structure, though certainly only a microscopic
minority of them might be suitable to host a whatever form of life. We could again
be tempted to think that there might be a different actor for every possible universe,
but this hypothesis would re-new the "individual existential problem ", but this
time applied to actors in different universes. Each of them may be wondering "Why
me? The other universes would exist without me? ". No, this means that we didn’t
understand all the arguments we saw and to fall again into the habit hard to lose
to think that everyone has their own conscience. But consciousness is not to be
thought of as something that exists in several copies, but as something which expresses
itself in different forms. If all the possible universes correspond to mathematical
structures, we can conclude that among all these structures, some will be complex
enough to allow the manifestation of consciousness. To return to our informal terminology,
some mathematical structures will be able to accommodate a stage with characters
performing an action, allowing the appearance of our unique actor.
4.2 It seems impossible to
enumerate all the possible universes with all the possible stories that can be realized
within them, but instead it’s not something so difficult, and there are several
ways to do this, and they are equivalent methods. In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges published
a story called "The Library of Babel", which described an imaginary library consisting
of infinite books of 410 pages each, with 40 lines per page, and 40 characters for
each line. The available characters are only 25, including 22 small letters (Borges
does not specify, but it could be the Hebrew alphabet, which has 22 letters), the
comma, the point and the white space. Based on these definitions of format and size
of books, the total number of different books, even if astronomical, results to
be a finite number. The narrator of the story in fact advances the conjecture that
the library is "infinite and periodic." It's quite easy to imagine a way to generate
all the books in the library. We could begin creating a book composed only of white
spaces, then one with a single letter "a" followed by white spaces, another with
a single letter "b" and so on until the "z", then also one with a single comma and
one with a single point. Then we can go on with all combinations of two characters:
space and "a", "a" and "a", "b" and "a", and so until the last. Then we continue
with all possible combinations of three, four, 40 characters, and so on up to all
the 656,000 characters that are contained in each book, thus obtaining every possible
book. The total number is calculated by raising 25 (the number of different characters)
to the power of 656,000 (40 characters by 40 lines per 410 pages), a number with
more than 900,000 digits, but it is still a finite number. Yet, in this finite set
we could find information potentially infinite. How is this possible? The trick
is that the information is hidden in the same selection of the book. In that library,
we could find somewhere our own biography with our life lived so far. If we are
curious to get some detail, we may find the book entirely devoted to describing
our day yesterday, or a day of one year ago, or our day of birth. We might find
a book that sums up a year, or a month, or describes in a very minute way one second
of our lives. And even if we are not able to recognize it, there is a book with
our day tomorrow, and the one describing our next birthday, and also one about our
dying day. It's frightening, yet it is there, but do not worry: even if we find
it, we would not be able to recognize it. We could see that there are all our possible
lives, and so we would never know, until the facts have been happened, which was
the one that corresponded to reality, or at least, to the reality of this time.
4.3 It is also possible to imagine a library of images.
If you think of a computer screen, instinctively we think that it may show infinite
images, yet it is made of a finite number of pixels, each of which can assume a
finite number of colors. The images are not really infinite, and even the number
of all the possible sequences of two, three, hundred, thousand, a billion images
is not infinite. The color of each pixel can be encoded in an integer, and all the
colors of all the pixels of the screen can be combined to form a still larger number,
and likewise also the whole sequence of the frames of a two-hour video, or even
two thousand hours, or two thousand years of life may be encoded in a single integer
very high, but not infinite. Even the audio can be encoded in the same way. An 8
GB DVD containing a film can be interpreted as a single integer of about 20 billion
digits. You can think of a machine that may produces, one after another, all the
possible DVD, encoding for each of the 8 billion bytes a value from 0 to 255, up
to exhaust every possible combination. It is clear that the vast majority of the
collection would be composed by images and sounds without any meaning, but in a
very small minority of DVD you will find all the movies that have been made and
also those which will ever be made
in the future. There
would be a movie corresponding to each book in the library of Babel, and vice versa,
for every movie we could find a book
from the library of Babel, which describes it. As for the books, we do not have
to produce DVDs longer than two hours: at the end of each DVD, somewhere there will
be a DVD for each possible continuation. Countless stories in a finite collection
of DVDs!
4.4 Just supposing that there
exists a set of lives that can be experienced equivalent to this collection, and
only a single experimenter, gives us a purely solipsistic view that I would like
to avoid. However, we can imagine that a single life, a single DVD or a book from
the library of Babel can be selected only together with many other books, DVDs,
or different lives that form an overall coherent group of stories that must be experienced
"in block ". This makes sense because each story results to be generated and well-framed
by a collection of stories that precede it, so the group as a whole can self-justify
its own existence, allowing to form the entire script necessary for a complete representation
with all the characters and the unique actor. In this way, the set of all possible
mathematical combinations of numbers is no longer considered as a set of distinct
elements, but as a set of systems each containing elements that have consistent
relationships with each other to form coherent stories . So we get the latest model
of interpretation, where each individual story represents a number which influences
and is influenced by other individual stories, according with consistent rules,
creating what in mathematics is called a formal system.
4.5 Interpreting the numbers as encoded propositions that
apply to other numbers, we can manipulate them in a mechanical way, with confidence
that the number obtained as a result can be interpreted as new information that,
if the start-up information are true, is necessarily true. In this way we can build
in a mechanical way all the propositions that can be derived from any set of starting
assumptions and rules, provided that the postulates are true and the rules do not
contradict each other. Mathematicians would like to be able to construct a formal
system that can prove any proposition on the integer numbers, but when they tried
to do it, they found that it is not possible. The simple arithmetic of integer numbers
by itself is already so complex to avoid any definitive formalization. This means
that even if you can reduce any possible universe to an integer number, it can still
contain something that cannot be inferred solely from its physical description and
the rules that govern it. We can always extend a formal system with new assumptions
and new rules to cover a growing number of truths, but their incompleteness is an
unavoidable feature. Although we are now in the field of a free speculation, it
is precisely in this area of uncertainty that
it could be set to the phenomenon of life and consciousness. Kurt Godel demonstrated
that within any formal system,
it is always possible to form a sentence that expresses the meaning: "I cannot be
proven within this formal system." We cannot find in the physical world a rational
reason of the existence of life and the emergence of consciousness. Any scientific
explanation could apply equally well to a world of machines without a true conscience.
From this standpoint, consciousness is destined to remain "something more" that
was not technically necessary. The complete collection of all possible DVD exists
even if no one looks at it, but the sense of the information that it contains becomes
real only when an observer will view at them. Its function is not just passive,
because the attribution of a meaning is an active experience, as long as the choice
of the set of DVDs to view as a block, conceding that there was more than one, and
that a whatever form of free will were be possible. It is significant that in mathematics
it was necessary to introduce the axiom of choice to permit the selection of a single
item from a non-empty set. "Understanding" and "choosing", which are the key features
that characterize all conscious beings, are still outside of what can be formalized.
4.6 This interpretation of life is connected to the set of all possible multiverses
proposed by Tegmark, and offers a vision that is the best we can imagine as a response
to the general existential problem. We can imagine that all mathematical structures
correspond to some universe, but only those complex enough to contain living structures
can actually be tested. Formation of these living structures must be justifiable
within the rules that govern the evolution of the universe that contains them, which
must be not-contradictory for make it result self-sustaining. The Open individual
view of personal identity claims that our own current “self”, however, will be the
experience of each of these possible lives, and that each event will be lived once
and for all the living participants. At this point, to consider as existing even
all the universes and the events without no observers, there is just like an agreement
on what we want to define as "existing", even when the relationship with our unique
"I" is purely theoretical. According to our response, we may conclude that our universe
is made of such stuff as dreams are made on.
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