[whswhs]

I said that I would comment more on my view of consciousness. Here it is.

To me, the essential fact about consciousness is <i>viewpoint</i>. A consciousness is a focusing of attention on some object or activity.

But "focusing of attention" means that we have a unified field of information processing going on. Information in one part of the field can induce a different part of the field to aim at a different object. Two different information processing centers can be part of the same consciousness if they are linked together with high enough bandwidth, so that it routinely happens that information being processes in one migrates to the other, and vice versa. My left and right hemispheres contribute to one consciousness because my corpus callosum has fairly high bandwidth; my brain and another person's are linked through lower-bandwidth channels—speech, facial expression, posture—and do not support a single consciousness.

Signal strength is finite, so to have a lot of subsystems interacting with high bandwidth, it helps to have them physically unified in a single organ, such as the brain. But a physically unified organ, and for that matter the physically unified organism that houses it, naturally has a single worldline. So there's a natural link between unity and continuity of consciousness, and continuity of worldline.

All of this is a product of the actual facts about how information flows through human nervous systems, and between them. A technology that provided sufficiently high bandwidth might change that. But I don't see that THS has such a technology.

Bill Stoddard