What is the solution to the paradox of the pile and the heap for consciousness?

Question

There is a paradox where you can keep adding a grain of sand to a pile. Eventually it becomes a heap. I don't really see it as a paradox. Now think about how the brain does things and thinks in theories and claims to get answers and feel them. Eventually, the brain does enough activity to define it to meaningfully represent a thought. But some 20th of a second has to make the difference. How can just that 20th of a second create the thought when you have nowhere near enough time to think during it?

Answer 1

It's a very difficult question to answer. I think the actions of adapting and understanding properties of the environment you adapted to which could be anything like driving a Toronto subway, being a surgeon, or any plan to learn how to do have some sort of order and structure in the brain giving reports that we claim to be meaningful. Some people think in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Other people think in Quine's New Foundations set theory. But they contradict each other. Maybe neither ZF nor NF are the reality. Maybe it's all abstract thinking. However, when somebody is thinking in one, they feel like the theory is real and meaningfully represents strange and wierd entities distinct from its own formalization. However, we still define the brain actions to meaningfully represent that abstract thinking.

Let's say there are 2 people the first of them was asked the question "What is 2 + 2?" Their strategy is "Always hand what ever question I'm asked to the second person." Then they hand them that question which is actually asking them that question. There strategy also is "Hand what ever question I'm asked to the first person." Obviously, they will never get an answer. However, I want to analyze what the algorithm actually is. The algorithm is "Hand the problem to the first person and then have each of their strategies be to hand the problem to the other person." Then what algorithm doe the person who handed it to then use? That's the operand of the algorithm. Since the strategy is for them to each hand the problem to the other person, the first person follows the algorithm "Hand the problem to the second person and then have each of our strategies be to hand the problem to the other person." No which algorithm does this have as an operand? Since the strategy is to have them hand the problem to each other, the algorithm is "Hand the problem to the first person and then have our strategies be to hand each other the problem." It seems like you know what algorithm you're using because you know what algorithm that algorithm has as an operand and you know what algorithm the original algorithm has an an operand because you know what algorithm that operand has as an operand and it keeps going for ever. Maybe some people think in a theory like this and that's why they argued that Earth has turtles under it all the way down for ever.

Religious people deny that they're gonna die. Maybe they think in a different theory than the science. If the laws said we were on an infinitely large ground and in one horizontal axis, the ground along with space was expanding by a factor of 2 every 5 minutes and along the perpendicular axis, it was contracting by a factor of 2 every 5 minutes and there was a uniform distribution of people at the beginning of time and the laws of physics said they will all live for ever and aren't going to die, we would still observe somebody else as dying when ever they want so far way that they were in the space expanding away from you faster than light. You would also see people as getting born when they're no longer in the space that's contracting towards you faster than light. But it would no be the case.

Maybe they think life can be treated like the turtles going all the way down for ever because that's the only way they can make sense of things. Maybe they're like "How is it possible that we are conscious for a short period of time? Because we will eventually have enough time to analyse how that period of time went. How is it possible that we conscious for the longer period of time? Because we will eventually have enough time to analyse how that patch of time went."