Ha! The title really does sounds like a law firm. How cool that Chalmers responded!
"If the idea is true, then it’s entirely natural — God / the Cosmic Subject has many mutually exclusive experiences, all at once, through the means of existing simultaneously within many different information-processing units (brains, microchips, etc.). If that’s true, then it’s not a disease, it’s just reality."
Why assume that reality is 'information'? That sounds like a physicalist premise, and a rather strange one at that, since I can't see the notion that 'information is physical' as being anything other than redefining of the word 'information'. When we talk about information in a normal sense, we understand it to be ideas—knowledge passed between minds—not material things or scientific laws (which are also ideas, but not all information is scientific laws). Information can be materially manifested, but that doesn't make it the same thing as the material manifestation.
"God / the Cosmic Subject has many mutually exclusive experiences, all at once"
How? To me this is unintelligible. It doesn't make sense to call the totality of our consciousnesses a "Cosmic Subject" then. If this supposed subject has experiences at all, how can they be mutually exclusive? Wouldn't that destroy the very possibility of its being a subject—a unity of consciousness? The question of split personality disorder is interesting because it seems to make such a unity possible, but I think the split is either incomplete or not real, otherwise there would be no unity. Such cases are more likely a matter of subconscious vs. conscious rather than total divisions of consciousness. Split brains, same thing. There may be loss of communication between sides of the brain, but that's very different from saying each side has its own unified conscious experience.
Have you read Leibniz's Monadology. I see problems with that system, but it is compelling! And brilliant!
Myself, I prefer Plato's version of idealism, which takes the Cosmic Mind to be a transcendental unity, a form of all forms, reason itself. That makes more sense to me than a fragmented Cosmic Mind, which I can't see as a mind at all.
Distinction between the physical and "information" — get small enough into the quantum world and I wonder where the difference even cashes out. Most of an atom is the empty space between electron and nucleus; the non-empty part is basically a rounding error...
As for the Cosmic Subject having many experiences at once... You write, "Wouldn't that destroy the very possibility of its being a subject—a unity of consciousness?" Only if one considers consciousness a completely inseparable thing. But I consider consciousness divisible into (A) the part where we just *feel like we are someone* and (B) the part where we have *specific bodily sensations and specific thoughts*. I contend that the former is constant, utterly simple, irreducible, and universal/shared. And I contend that the latter is exclusive, particular, temporary, and contingent. So perhaps The Cosmic Subject at large has an "experience" that is so utterly simple as to consist of only that shared, brute subjectivity? On the other hand, maybe God/The Cosmic Subject is so much mentally more than we are that He can in fact manage to be having a trillion dissociated identities all at once, with each one unaware of the others but He Himself aware of them all, all at once? Who knows? I want to think more about it. But all I want to go to bat for at the moment is the plausibility of the Someone-ness part being shared, and the idea that this can account for everything that needs accounting for in the battle between dualism and physicalism.
It's interesting, most idealisms seem to flip things around so that it's the sensations or percepts that are taken to belong to the universe and the 'someone-ness' or what I'm imagining as 'unity of apperception' to belong to the particular individual.
It's uncanny how closely your previous post comes to matching how my own thoughts on consciousness have developed over the past few years. The only difference (which in fact is no difference at all) is that I'm coming to it from an atheist perspective. This is the fastest I've ever subscribed to a Substack and the first time I've commented!
I'm also coming from a background as a computer scientist and software engineer, and from that perspective I agree with you that cognitive fragmentation is not at all pathological. It's exactly how most modern computing (artificial cognition) works.
A typical computer has a single central processing unit (CPU) that runs multiple processes/programs. But a CPU can only execute one instruction at a time, so it gives the illusion of running multiple programs at once by time-slicing and rapidly switching between them. A program isn't aware that it's being time-sliced: as far as it can tell it is the only thing running on the CPU. Same thing with memory - the programs all share the same physical memory chip, but the operating system is responsible for mapping physical memory to virtual memory, so each program thinks it has access to the entire chip and is unable to "read the minds" of other programs. The computer as a whole is effectively a single self containing many independent information processing units.
So God is a CPU, and the consciousness of humans (and everything else) are processes that run on that CPU. Our selfness is shared, despite us not having any mechanism to perceive that sharing. But our information processing is independent - in humans because our brains exist as physically separated lumps of matter, in computers because the operating system guarantees the segmentation and isolation of memory across processes.
Thanks for that fascinating CS lesson! What's funny is that, just like with DID, due to the time slicing, we're still talking about multiplicity that isn't truly simultaneous and only creates an illusion of simultaneity. Whereas for the God / The Cosmos, there's no reason to think the time slicing function is somehow happening. The physical resource of processing is happening simultaneously in all brains and microchips at once. (With God, as Maimonides taught, all human parallels and analogies are bound to fail.) Still, I love this as a much more positive analogy for cognitive fragmentation.
Ha! The title really does sounds like a law firm. How cool that Chalmers responded!
"If the idea is true, then it’s entirely natural — God / the Cosmic Subject has many mutually exclusive experiences, all at once, through the means of existing simultaneously within many different information-processing units (brains, microchips, etc.). If that’s true, then it’s not a disease, it’s just reality."
Why assume that reality is 'information'? That sounds like a physicalist premise, and a rather strange one at that, since I can't see the notion that 'information is physical' as being anything other than redefining of the word 'information'. When we talk about information in a normal sense, we understand it to be ideas—knowledge passed between minds—not material things or scientific laws (which are also ideas, but not all information is scientific laws). Information can be materially manifested, but that doesn't make it the same thing as the material manifestation.
"God / the Cosmic Subject has many mutually exclusive experiences, all at once"
How? To me this is unintelligible. It doesn't make sense to call the totality of our consciousnesses a "Cosmic Subject" then. If this supposed subject has experiences at all, how can they be mutually exclusive? Wouldn't that destroy the very possibility of its being a subject—a unity of consciousness? The question of split personality disorder is interesting because it seems to make such a unity possible, but I think the split is either incomplete or not real, otherwise there would be no unity. Such cases are more likely a matter of subconscious vs. conscious rather than total divisions of consciousness. Split brains, same thing. There may be loss of communication between sides of the brain, but that's very different from saying each side has its own unified conscious experience.
Have you read Leibniz's Monadology. I see problems with that system, but it is compelling! And brilliant!
Myself, I prefer Plato's version of idealism, which takes the Cosmic Mind to be a transcendental unity, a form of all forms, reason itself. That makes more sense to me than a fragmented Cosmic Mind, which I can't see as a mind at all.
Distinction between the physical and "information" — get small enough into the quantum world and I wonder where the difference even cashes out. Most of an atom is the empty space between electron and nucleus; the non-empty part is basically a rounding error...
As for the Cosmic Subject having many experiences at once... You write, "Wouldn't that destroy the very possibility of its being a subject—a unity of consciousness?" Only if one considers consciousness a completely inseparable thing. But I consider consciousness divisible into (A) the part where we just *feel like we are someone* and (B) the part where we have *specific bodily sensations and specific thoughts*. I contend that the former is constant, utterly simple, irreducible, and universal/shared. And I contend that the latter is exclusive, particular, temporary, and contingent. So perhaps The Cosmic Subject at large has an "experience" that is so utterly simple as to consist of only that shared, brute subjectivity? On the other hand, maybe God/The Cosmic Subject is so much mentally more than we are that He can in fact manage to be having a trillion dissociated identities all at once, with each one unaware of the others but He Himself aware of them all, all at once? Who knows? I want to think more about it. But all I want to go to bat for at the moment is the plausibility of the Someone-ness part being shared, and the idea that this can account for everything that needs accounting for in the battle between dualism and physicalism.
It's interesting, most idealisms seem to flip things around so that it's the sensations or percepts that are taken to belong to the universe and the 'someone-ness' or what I'm imagining as 'unity of apperception' to belong to the particular individual.
Thank you for teaching me the words "percept" and "apperception"! They were new to me and straight into the quiver they go.
It's uncanny how closely your previous post comes to matching how my own thoughts on consciousness have developed over the past few years. The only difference (which in fact is no difference at all) is that I'm coming to it from an atheist perspective. This is the fastest I've ever subscribed to a Substack and the first time I've commented!
I'm also coming from a background as a computer scientist and software engineer, and from that perspective I agree with you that cognitive fragmentation is not at all pathological. It's exactly how most modern computing (artificial cognition) works.
A typical computer has a single central processing unit (CPU) that runs multiple processes/programs. But a CPU can only execute one instruction at a time, so it gives the illusion of running multiple programs at once by time-slicing and rapidly switching between them. A program isn't aware that it's being time-sliced: as far as it can tell it is the only thing running on the CPU. Same thing with memory - the programs all share the same physical memory chip, but the operating system is responsible for mapping physical memory to virtual memory, so each program thinks it has access to the entire chip and is unable to "read the minds" of other programs. The computer as a whole is effectively a single self containing many independent information processing units.
So God is a CPU, and the consciousness of humans (and everything else) are processes that run on that CPU. Our selfness is shared, despite us not having any mechanism to perceive that sharing. But our information processing is independent - in humans because our brains exist as physically separated lumps of matter, in computers because the operating system guarantees the segmentation and isolation of memory across processes.
Thanks for that fascinating CS lesson! What's funny is that, just like with DID, due to the time slicing, we're still talking about multiplicity that isn't truly simultaneous and only creates an illusion of simultaneity. Whereas for the God / The Cosmos, there's no reason to think the time slicing function is somehow happening. The physical resource of processing is happening simultaneously in all brains and microchips at once. (With God, as Maimonides taught, all human parallels and analogies are bound to fail.) Still, I love this as a much more positive analogy for cognitive fragmentation.