This blog is about "what if" more than "what is", and so I am happy to have you discuss or argue with me the implications of an idea right up to suggesting that an idea implies something we both agree to be false, but please don't use logical fallacies (authority, ad hominym, false dichotomy, straw man, etc.). Also, the blog lives in a world narrowed by key definitions listed on this page, and so I'm not willing to entertain certain objections to the definitions themselves, such as that they're simply wrong. But feel free to suggest how changing the definitions will bear philosophical fruit!
In this blog,
- Multiverse means the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. This is a view first popularized by Hugh Everett half a century ago, and which I swear I thought of all on my own before I heard of Mr. Everett, although it's more likely that the idea has made its way into popular culture (e.g. TTBOOK) and that's how I picked it up. Used sensibly, this definition resolves key "paradoxes" (scare quotes perhaps not necessary because a paradox means not really a paradox) such as time loops (the watch in Somewhere in Time and the invention of Clear Aluminum in Star Trek 4), the grandfather paradox exploited by the Terminator), and most noteably the Scrodenger's Cat paradox.
- Consciousness means the awareness of experiences and feelings, having a sense of identity ("selfhood"), and it is the executive control system of the mind, i.e. self-awareness.
- Identity is the property of being the same thing, not just a copy. ("Identical copy" is an oxymoron.) "Identity" gets tricky when a thing (or person) changes over time. Is a person's Identity preserved from cradle to grave?
- "All That" is the rest of the things that connect Multiverse, Consciousness, Identity, and closely related ideas such as Memory and Experience (and whether Memory and Experience are really the same thing!), and Recognition (Identity from a different point of view), as well as more distantly related ideas such as Probability, Cosmology, Theories of hidden dimensions (e.g. String Theory, and even to some extent Special Relativity), and most of all the relationships among these seemingly disparate areas of philosophy.
