And what is the "mundane sense in which we are actually conscious"? I don't know what that means. (I don't know the other sense either.) My own definition of "conscious" is a scale of mapmaking of external reality internally, in different dimensions. Literally.
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Replying to @thewiseturtle @artilectium
This is just the mind. You can make models of external (and also internal) world without being conscious of that. Consciousness is an integrated reflexive model of what the mind attended to. Attention is separate from modeling itself.
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Replying to @Plinz @artilectium
Yes, attention and "self-consciousness" are higher levels of consciousness than the 1D model of reality that simple sensory things have. Humans have 3-4 dimensions of modeling ability, from what I can tell. (Giving us 4D space-time awareness.)
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Replying to @thewiseturtle @artilectium
In our mind, space and time are represented as independent dimensions: you cannot mentally rotate between space and time. However, we can probably go to ~4D in general, without nesting.
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Replying to @Plinz @artilectium
In the brain, as in computers, space and time are interchangable to some extent, as they are just dimensions. Dimensions are abstract variables: changes from point A to point B.
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Replying to @thewiseturtle @artilectium
No, they really are not. Rotations between space and time are only defined in relativistic physics (which our brains don't use to represent our environment) and even there, the behavior of the temporal dimension is different to space.
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Replying to @Plinz @artilectium
Perhaps we're talking about very different things. I'm talking about how we can map the difference between "me now" and "you over there", or we can map "me now" vs "me tomorrow", using the same dimension of "difference".
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Replying to @thewiseturtle @artilectium
Identity over time is again a very different kind of representation. An object with divergent aspects can be unified by combining its divergent instances with an explicit identity relation, which when ordered becomes a world line, and when anchored to temporal events, a biography
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Replying to @Plinz @artilectium
That's adding dimensions. I'm talking about a single dimension. One dimension can represent a change over time or space. To get a biography you need at least three dimensions (I think), to compare how something changes over time compared to something else.
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Replying to @thewiseturtle @artilectium
You can think of most representations as graphs, with objects, features, events as nodes, and links between them as relations. Temporal events can be ordered with succession relations, and anchored to time points with co-occurrence relations.
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A dimension can be thought of as a type of link. A continuous temporal dimension is a function that selects a range of nodes and links within the graph, based on a single latent variable (which represents a time point, and interval or a distribution of time points or intervals).
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Similarly, a continuous spatial dimension is a function that selects a range of objects, features, events based on a latent variable that represents a point, interval, or distribution in space along a single direction.
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The selection can also be multi-dimensional, which means that we can use multi-valued functions to select a range of objects, whereby the variation of the values yields an ordering of these objects in a space. When we talk about the "stuff in space" space, we mean position space.
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