.The Cartesian Theater Redivivus .& The one true self Jack, Tony &alia,
We all know that the brain is a very complex system, but this just raises the originating problem of modern philosophy, who or what is watching that show in the Cartesian Theater that is our mind/brain?
It matters not a whit whether we are talking analog, digital or quantum, or whether it is 10^6 or 10^60 bits of information. Somehow that vast array of information has to get converted into one coherent, felt meaning as what one feels when standing before the Taj Mahal, or what Mozart felt and knew when one of his symphonies came to him in a single inspired flash.
This is the problem of explaining the coherent unity of wakeful, experienced consciousness. You are simply recreating and restating the same problem that has bedevilled the best and the brightest for the last 300 years. You bring nothing new to this table.
Your mentor, David Bohm, wrote a book describing this problem, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order." He offered no solution, beyond his lengthy verbal speculation on the possible nature of this implicate order, which had virtually no correspondence with his work on the Q-potential that you sometimes tout as being identical with this implicate order.
The Cartesian Theater of our brain is buzzing along all night long, and if we do not happen to be dreaming, then the theater is **empty.** How does your model even begin to explain or justify this overwhelming phenomenological difference in terms that do not just keep begging the same question, ad nauseum???
The last time we went over this ground, Jack, you ended up very reluctantly having to admit that there must be some otherwise unspecified self-like, non-spatial structure in some otherwise unspecified super-implicate order that in some unknown fashion is able to observe the Cartesian Theater. Nothing you have said in the intervening months has shed even the least light on this mysterious Self.
I agree, Jack, that none of the other scientists working on this problem has come up with any plausible explanation or model for the Self. Unfortunately, that ignominious failure on the part of your most esteemed colleagues does nothing whatsoever to enhance the status of your own effort.
Idealists, personalists, immaterialists and the like are willing to accept the mystery of the self as the one, fundamental, abiding cornerstone lying at the foundation of any **conceivable** reality. We move on from that basis point to get on with our lives in working out an understanding of the rest of reality, including physics, morality, aesthetics, logic, mathematics, &ct., &ct., &ct.... This will be the one and only conceivable theory of everything. This will allow us to understand where we are, from whence we come, and whither we go. This is all that we will ever need to know.
Others, like yourself, will continue to tilt at the windmills of the dry, contentless, abstractions of their own devise, leaving nothing but scribbles in the sand.
Decide where logically there must lie the conceptual center of gravity of any *conceivable* reality, and then proceed from there. You, Jack, continue to scrounge in the in the dusty drawer of a bygone day, mesmerized at the merest beable or bauble, waiting for the Cosmic Self to knock once again on the door of your humble abode.
Knock, knock, Jack. Wake up, smell the aroma of the one true Self, and set aside your childish playthings.
Dan
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rev. 5/9/00