I have to stop thinking about my gf's concepts. The "eye of the beholder" actually seems to be a very German concept that has been elevated by [[Ernst Gombrich]] to the status of a program for art-historical research. It simply states that an artwork is never finished. Instead, every observer adds the layer of their own observation to it, developing it further in time. After my recent talk with my friend N about [[Reading There Is No Antimemetics Division (2008)]], I am set on adopting the image that the physical world somehow forms around ideas. We deduce laws of nature or other patterns by observing the regularities of the world but they exist somewhere independently and cause the physical world to form around them. This is Platonism I suppose but important for my version of sci-fi. If it were the other way round, I could not justify transferring minds as a means of technological immortality. The mind as a mass of ideas would simply not be something that we could preserve without a body or a precise state of the world. It would always change, whenever anything in the world changes. If instead it were a uniquely defined combination of (immutable) ideas that just manifests itself in thoughts, and the brain making these thoughts possible and thereby also the interpretation of the world which will be that mind's reality, the notion of preserving it becomes elegant. For art in the Gombrich sense, we are also introducing the notion of perception. So if we say an artwork is a uniquely defined set of ideas, perceiving it connects it to other sets of ideas. If physics follows from ideas, what we would expect is that the physical form changes with perception. We can argue that. For example, people might see it as more important over time, which means it will be exposed in more prestigious places, better lit, more people will talk and write about it, people will encounter it at various moments in their lives. It might be worked on more by the artist, maybe some other rights holder, it might be copied to other media, appear as memes or whatever. So it's average physical appearance will change, even if only one original object exists. Crucially, this view also holds if there is no physical, or at least no solid object associated with it as is for example the case for a musical piece transmitted from ear to ear or a \*.jpeg. If the object is the source of truth, then all these other forms and alterations are not the same artwork. I currently tend to favor the former interpretation. In my personal life I notice one particularly striking example. On one day I'll like to draw attention, talk and be looked at. I'll smile, joke, walk straight. I will appear as an outgoing person and have one set of interactions occur on average more often. I'll know in the morning if I feel this way and predict my day with some certainty. On other days I'll feel like a failure. Being seen will be painful. I'll hide, even when going out. Not look at anybody, keep a low profile. Outcomes will be reliably different. The ideas I have about myself change physics: my own appearance, the statistical physics - let's fancifully call it the thermodynamics - of social life. I don't deny that there is a back and forth and cause and effect cannot be ordered unequivocally. Maybe my state of mind changed because of yesterday's experience (often, it doesn't feel that way) or my body's internal signaling leads to these different thoughts subconsciously. But what is conceptually more useful? If my brain is the problem, I have an easily recognizable place to start my quest for change. If it's the subconscious body it gets messy, I actually don't have any ONE thing I could do. Change becomes vague. I am a writer pondering my work. In a world of ideas, a mind is a relatively simple thing. Just gather all the ideas expressed in thoughts and body and replicate them. You'll end up yourself again. In a world of matter that is impossible. Even if you could clone your exact body right now, you cannot hold the entire world of experience static. So tomorrow you would be different from your clone and that discrepancy would quickly explode into chaos. And most importantly: a mind could not be the same in different bodies. What if a person is man or woman, bee or elephant, spaceship or an interplanetary distributed logistics operator? There is one more philosophical bit. Maybe the world is the realization of perfect ideals. Or ideas are the original things that you get when you unwind the whole process of physics. The axioms of existence. With our understanding we can go both ways for a while. Induction and deduction. But first of all there is randomness in nature for all we know. And induction has infinitely many solutions. You can come up with arbitrary rules to limit them but it doesn't change the fact that any abstraction fits an infinite number of concrete situations So there is no way that we could reach those endpoints. Whatever we believe, we are limited by the physical world and need to approximate anything using both planes, so to speak. For the question of immortality. We'll probably be more similar to a person having our memories and thought patterns, even if the transmission is lossy. We'll probably change in the transfer itself as well as with our bodies and the changing world around us. What we gain is the knowledge that somebody almost like us will always be. That's comforting, a little bit more so than natural offspring. We could also make it a rule to impose one special memory on the next us: that they have always been us. But I believe the moment we transfer minds, we'll give up the notion of self altogether. Because either we always change, and identify with it or we don't change beyond certain limits and have nothing but our biological lifespan. That last part is implausible because no 70 year old believes they are the same person they were at 20. So why not extend life by taking the option of creating very similar versions of ourselves? And either accept that we die ever moment, or never.