I've been trying to formulate thoughts I have on consciousness that make sense in my head, but I haven't been able to communicate it effectively.
Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc).
The answer that I lean toward is that there is no such thing as you or me. There is only one consciousness and it is merely being filtered through each living (or perhaps nonliving) being in containerized modules.
So, to "me", it feels like I'm experiencing my own consciousness but in reality everyone is the same "me". You are me, I am you, etc, we are simply filtering consciousness through different atomic arrangements.
For example, let's say you read about a criminal who does a terrible thing and you can't imagine yourself ever doing that. But in reality, it is the same "you", only that your consciousness has been filtered through a different arragement of atoms that has caused that "module" to act that way. It is the same YOU who committed that crime, all it took was a different filtering device to make you act that way.
Anyway, that's kind of what I'm thinking. I'm sure it's not an original thought, but I don't know what kind of philosophy this is called other than "one consciosness".
> Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc).
Why doesn't the fire in your car's engine suddenly appear in the engine of a car down the street?
This is why I say I'm not able to communicate my thought very well. Your statement is simply the obvious, this is not what I'm trying to get at.
It's more like... why did my consciousness decide to attach itself specifically to "my" body, and only my body? Is it REALLY only attached to my body? Each of us are simply a collection of atoms - as Carl Sagan says, we are the universe trying to understand itself.
I have consciousness AND I'm just merely made up of atoms, while every other person is also merely made up of atoms. Does that mean my consciousness could have randomly ended up inside any other "being"? And would that consciousness be the "same" me, just in a different body? OR would "my" consciousness be affected and come out differently if it were filtered by a different being? This is kind of what I'm trying to get at.
Someone else on this thread said something along the lines of they think of consciousness as a field that permeates everything. This is along the lines of what I'm thining. Consciousness is the same, we are all the same consciousness, simply filtered in different modules.
Because really simple brains don't have consciousness, they aren't sufficiently powerful enough to have the "mental machinery" needed for consciousness.
We know that brains can implement things like theory of mind, self-awareness and abstract concepts; these particular things don't require a human mind but they do appear only in animal brains above some level of complexity, and don't appear in brains so simple that we'd have the power to simulate them in 2020.
But what work is this notion of a universal consciousness doing for you? Why not just get rid of it and say that we are all just independent processes with psychological continuity that entails our experience of individuality?
> Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness?
Maybe you do, but there wouldn't be any way to tell because the brain only has memories of itself, you couldn't remember the swap even if it occurred. Our apparent reality does not rule out solipsism.
That means when we die we just slip into someone else and never really even know it because we have all their memories and experiences up to that point in time. Perhaps this process even happens all the time as we lose consciousness and regain it. Our bodies are merely antennas for tuning into the vast universal consciousness. Madness.
The takeaway from this for me is to be kind to any living thing as it could be you.
Because your body is the record of your experience and existence.
That's why a lot of people think a human brain would never be able to be uploaded to a computer, and if you could do it, you'd not be yourself - you'd be something else.
You are the sum of your experiences, a build up of scars, traumas, and so on.
So according to this theory, you'd only wake up on someones else body if that person had the same sum of experiences you had, yet that's impossible because only you are you - not even twins would experience this. Maybe that's why we value this experience so much: it's so unique and so intimate to ourselves, that we hold on to it dearly.
You then have hints of collective (un)consciousness. Jung explored this concept with archetypes.
> So according to this theory, you'd only wake up on someones else body if that person had the same sum of experiences you had
I know that's impossible for many reasons, but which body would you wake up in if somebody would make an exact subatomic-perfect duplicate of your body. Wouldn't the copy become just a twin having identical memories and believing he's you? Wouldn't you still only see the world from the point where you've been rather than where your copy has emerged?
Maybe he would be just like you up to the point the copy was made, after that you'd have different experiences (even if it is by having a different perspective of the world), and maybe that's enough to have the sense of his own identify?
Maybe you'd be the same in a fraction of an instance in time?
Maybe you'd never be the same because the process of duplication is an experience within itself enough to develop a different self?
You are never the same you from one moment to next, and the mind adapts to deal with this change. So I would think the mind would adapt when downloaded into a new body. Certainly, your point stands, in that the mind downloaded into a new body would not be the same you, but I would argue that it might be enough of you to maintain the sense of you.
My point is that the separation of body and mind doesn't make sense in the eyes of some scientists. Like some of your memories are bound to scare tissue.
Some back it by the change of personality after major trauma.
Moving a mind to another body is most definitely quite a trauma (maybe the ultimate trauma?), which begs to ask the question:
What's the point of moving your mind to another body, if you'll cease to exist as you are? If you lose, like you said, the "sense of you".
So now build out an experiment, see if you can play around with this filter device and see if you can find something clever. Step 2, invent something crazy, or start a cult. Good Luck!
To me, it's like life is a conglomeration of matter built in such a fashion that it can act as an antenna, or a lens, attenuating and focusing consciousness such that it can be experienced.
Hang on, if there is only one shared consciousness, you would expect that you would be able to wake up in another person's body. It seems to like that would be an inevitable consequence of that proposition. The fact that this never happens demonstrates, to me, that we do have a persistent discrete individual identity.
This resonates with me as I have a similar thoughts on consciousness. The way I try to express my thoughts on this is to imagine that consciousness is a fabric that permeates the entire universe, but there exist these kind of extremely dense pockets of consciousness (ie, within us and our brains) where the fabric is tightly bound. Every kind of system that exists within the universe naturally lends itself to being conscious. The more complex the system the greater the density of consciousness it yields. Perhaps we cannot perceive consciousness in most (simpler) systems because it is minuscule compared to the density of consciousness within our brains, although we do tend to get these spooky kinds of insights and intuitions into the higher-order consciousness that emerges from many brains combined, such as collective consciousness, gaia, mass hysteria, etc.
> Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body?
Because conciousness (or rather, subjective perception) is a physical phenomenon after all - it's causally linked to the universe in a way that means it can't just "jump" brains absent some kind of telepathy.
Identity is not really mysterious from a "hard problem of conciousness" POV; it's simply one phenomenology (one 'quale') among many, and experienced meditators can even turn it on and off at will. It's really only proto-perception and perhaps proto-cognition that probably needs to be explained.
> Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc).
Maybe it's not attached to the brain, but rather produced/created by your brain?
> The answer that I lean toward is that there is no such thing as you or me.
I agree that there is no self. But that is different from consciousness.
I’ve got a quite scary thought about this: what if we are not only not the same consciousness after we fade away by daily sleep, etc.., but we are constantly fading away in short cycles, like every “tick” (planck time?) happening in the physical simulation of this world?
This seems related to the concept of Last Thursdayism - if the world was created last thursday, how would you be able to tell the difference?
You have some memories of earlier times than last thursday, but there's literally nothing that prevents them from being indistinguishably fake; your consciousness could be existing in a simulation that started five seconds ago, and there's no way to disprove that.
But the reasonable answer to that is if it's not possible to tell the difference, then we define that to be the same consciousness; so that the answer to the question "if we are not only not the same consciousness after we fade away by daily sleep, etc.., but we are constantly fading away in short cycles" is "it's the same consciousness, period" by definition.
> Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness?
I've thought about this too, and my conclusion is that there's no way to know. Maybe we wake up as someone else everyday, with all the emotional/psychological baggage that entails.
Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc).
The answer that I lean toward is that there is no such thing as you or me. There is only one consciousness and it is merely being filtered through each living (or perhaps nonliving) being in containerized modules.
So, to "me", it feels like I'm experiencing my own consciousness but in reality everyone is the same "me". You are me, I am you, etc, we are simply filtering consciousness through different atomic arrangements.
For example, let's say you read about a criminal who does a terrible thing and you can't imagine yourself ever doing that. But in reality, it is the same "you", only that your consciousness has been filtered through a different arragement of atoms that has caused that "module" to act that way. It is the same YOU who committed that crime, all it took was a different filtering device to make you act that way.
Anyway, that's kind of what I'm thinking. I'm sure it's not an original thought, but I don't know what kind of philosophy this is called other than "one consciosness".