I am still struggling with my central question (I read this to be the 'hard question') of why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none. Does anybody have some cursory reading about this subject?
My best summary of it: consciousness is primal, every bit of matter has perspective, every interaction has experience, the body you're 'occupying' is having a particularly complex and long-lived experience.
As for your question of why this one, well, someone's got to be having this one. As for why not another, there's no saying 'you' won't have another 'after' this experience ends, but if 'you' had them in a perfectly undifferentiated way that'd be a different experience again, and as stated, someone's got to be having this one.
This!! It all comes together. What the mystics have figured out through deepest self-introspection and meditation comes so close to our modern understanding derived by physics, biology and neuroscience. It is fascinating to see how these understandings converge.
If you assume that the observer can "occupy" a body, rather than be a body, you have to conclude that the memories are part of the body, not the observer. You assume that you occupy the "correct" body, because your present experience matches your memories, but that'd be true even if you moved to occupy another body. Moreover, how do you know that there isn't more than one observer in your body? Or maybe there's just one observer sharing all the bodies?
To answer your last to questions: I don’t know! And those formulations are simply, in my opinion, rhetorical variations of the hard questions too. One observer many bodies or many observers one body are equally valid possibilities, as far as I can tell, and I am not referring to split personality disorders or a collective external memory for that matter. It’s genuinely one of the most fascinating questions out there for me right now!
Materialism, which by my reading has the most evidence going for it, solves these particular questions rather easily. Your experience as an observer is the result of your brain. It's not another one or none b/c those aren't your particular brains.
This doesn't solve the "hard" problem, it's still quite mysterious how exactly and at what point neuronal mappings become sentient, but it does leave you without having to wonder the particular questions you asked there.
This seems like a common way that to me completely side steps the actual question. Sure, your brain powers intelligence, but nothing we have nothing on how it could create awareness, which seems qualitatively different.
It answers very clearly these questions posed by the person I was responding to:
> why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none.
It definitely does not answer the "hard" problem of consciousness, which is what you're alluding to and which I specifically and explicitly said it didn't answer.
I referred to the hard question in my OP, and I don’t think that materialism answers either of the question’s formulation. Materialism may answer it at one point, and I would be very impressed if it does, because it is going to require perhaps new mathematics, geometry, and physics for us to get there. So far, none of our tools for measurement of any form of field has led us any closer to answering the hard question.
Yes I noted it doesn't answer the "hard" problem explicitly in both of my replies here on this thread. Indeed, the very reason it is called the "hard" problem is b/c it very well seems perhaps unsolvable (though this is certainly debatable, but this is the very etymology of the term).
Your actual stated questions (why am I me and not someone else, etc) are in no way part of the "hard" problem's formulation, and are indeed easily answered by materialism as I noted.
Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why.
My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also say why I’m experiencing this particular branch.
> Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why.
They've made a good book to help people get the concept. It's called "the gateless gate" and it's a series of seemingly non-sensical stories, that you're supposed to think about and try to see the meaning behind it.
For an intro. I think the old stories have too many anachronisms for modern readers. There are too many meanings in the phrasing that the readers of the time would already know.
Do you know of any modern translations that frame the story in actual modern references?
I think it would make a bad introduction to buddhist philosophy in any way, it's meant as a more "advanced" text imo. Starting with a plain english intro (like Alan Watts, The Way of Zen) or simpler texts (the Dhammapada) should be easier.
VS Ramachandran has an interesting talk about mirror neurons, which is a subset of motor neurons. They activate when you perceive anybody else doing something as opposed to only activating during your actions. This is fundamentally a built-in empathy/group learning mechanism, but it also has some other interesting implications too.
For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.
I sometimes wonder if we are all basically the same conscious, threading through all of the "antennae" of life one after another. But I find this idea painful because it is tantamount to an immense cosmic loneliness.
Yes, although The Egg ultimately presumes separation of consciousness at some "higher level" given that there is a dialogue between such consciousnesses. My greater sense of loneliness comes from a sense that the very premise of a separation of consciousness exists as a deliberate goal of our universe, which was made by a "God" who is actually all of us, as a means to keep myself/ourself company and to introduce love. Sort of like we are all branches of the same tree. But people talk about having epiphanies about this as if it is a good thing that we are all the same, leading to a connectedness. But it also leads to loneliness.
Loneliness is a human instinct based on our evolutionary history as social primates though - if you travel up the antennae enough that there's no 'others' there's also no evolutionary pressures to make that loneliness a source of danger.
But what I find cool is that the lonely social ape can also look up the antenna and find all the security it could want - where I think some religions err is that when this happens, if you keep identifying with the insecure social ape rather than the many-antannaed-deiform it can interfere with the smooth communication between the two.
I feel that if one does not have the patience to wait, one may just go and selfexperiment. It is not, that Consciousness is in a lab somewhere where only some scientists have access, no it is right here! It is so much in our faces that we do not explore it ourselves, but rather wait for some "authorities" to explore that for us.
No! We can explore it by calming our mind and our senses with well established methods which are known for thousands of years (the ancient tradition of yoga for example, an do not think twisting and bending, no this goes MUCH further!!)
And then, when the senses are turned of (by practice or "outside help" e.g. think tank) and the mind is silenced, then we start to explore what lies beneath!!
They say: "When all the movements in the mind have ceased to exist, the knower dwells in his real nature" (or something along the lines, in the Yoga Sutras, roughly 1500 to 2000 years old )
I'm also stuck on the same thing. Why am I me and not someone or something else? I feel like most are just going to laugh at this question as completely obvious, but for me it's almost a deep sense of angst and awe. It used to keep me up at night.
I know this won't feel satisfactory, but there's nobody else and nothing else that you could be. Not even in principle. Your consciousness is an unique product of your brain's labor. Think of it not from the perspective of your consciousness (as if it could up and change bodies), but of your body. What other consciousness could "this body" have? No other than you.
I suppose I am at the beginning of asking this question out loud, and it has brought on some interesting discussions with my friends and family.
Although nobody has a clear answer on this subject (globally it seems, not only in the local one I'm exploring), the variety of answers and debates it has led to has been very exciting. On the other hand, I am a bit disappointed that none has been able to bring anything more insightful than I could find via exploring the possibilities by digging around on Wikipedia.
In fact, one question that I had been wondering, which is, at what point does an analogous conscious experience appear in terms of the quantum to human scale of complexity, has been asked already in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F by Thomas Nagel. I still wonder what it is like to be a planarian, or a fly on the wall of a board meeting (audio fidelity must suck).
It's a fascinating question, and I've long thought that it's the simplest one-sentence argument against physicalism. It's a fact that I am who I am (in the non-tautologous sense you allude to), but a complete physical description of the universe would presumably not include this fact.
It is the simplest one-sentence argument for physicalism! If consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, then it should be no surprise that everyone with a healthy brain has one, including you. If it isn’t, then what supernatural event caused it to appear specifically in you?
Matter isn’t like that though. Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique. There are no phenomena in the physical world that aren’t considered as part of a wider collection of other physical phenomena. Eg this atom in relation to that. There is no this and that subject, there is only One. Not even getting into the fact that mental states are already non physical
""Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique""
I think the problem with the argument is that you are giving way too much credit to consciousness. You are giving an opinion on its uniqueness from the point of view of a Conscious entity that itself hasn't grasped it's own Consciousness.
The really exciting part of all the latest AI tech, you can prove 'state of a neural net' is the 'state of experiencing the phenomena'.
For Brains. They can now do an MRI on a brain, and re-construct what image it is thinking about.
So, State of Neurons = Phenomenal Experiences.
The Phenomena you are saying is not physical, is really the physical state of the brains neurons.
The experience of seeing something is completely different from the physical state of the neurons that see though. You have to be "in" the physical state in order to have the actual experience. Any physical description of the neurons does nothing to capture the actual experience of being those neurons, and that's the gap.
But if you have one person reporting an experience and can capture the 'physical state'.
And then take someone else and have them report an experience, and capture the 'physical state'.
And they match, then you can start making the relationship.
Then if my mind is captured, and I'm thinking something that correlates, then I can 'assume' i'm experiencing what the other person is.
It will always be imperfect. I agree the experience of each person is unique.
But-> The whole problem of the 'eye-can't-see-the-eye' means the eye doesn't exist is also kind of just playing with logic.
So just because we can't embody the experience of another person, doesn't mean we can't reason about how that experience is being generated.
I agree there might be a relationship between the physical state and the actual experience of it, but ultimately they cannot be bridged. There's only one way to bridge that gap and it's to "be" the physical state, and that's a concept that has absolutely no analogy in physical phenomena.
But it's even worse than you say, because those relationships are generated purely within the mind, we don't find them outside the mind, so really all physicality is an illusion, it's all ultimately internal.
Or even worse, the phenomena doesn't exist internally or externally. They are a combination of the processing of the sensory inputs and the internal model. So the 'phenomena' is really the processing of the inputs, no substance at all because it is the processing itself.
Kind of what was described in 'Being You', by Anil Seth. Our reality is a 'controlled hallucination'. Though I don't like the terminology because it is to easily misunderstood.
But. Guess, I fall on side that we can still study how Phenomena is generated internally. And still be able to understand it. Just because we can't experience the exact same phenomena as someone else, shouldn't mean we can't figure out how it is generated.
> so really all physicality is an illusion, it's all ultimately internal.
You don't really believe that. If you did, you would be fine jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, or something even more fatal.. because the physical "doesn't matter", only the internal.
If I do that I think I will have a negative mental experience, therefore it matters. The internal world will become undesirable if I jump out of an airplane. There is no external reason why I don't want to do that. If I could jump out of an airplane without a parachute and not expect it will have a negative impact on my internal world I would be fine with doing it.
Why on earth would doing ANYTHNG in an imaginary, unimportant, realm affect your mental internal world?
You don't want to admit it, but you're basically confirming that you do understand that you can not stand apart from the physical realm. You are playing mental gymnastics to pretend you're in touch with some higher knowledge and understanding... but you're still constrained to the physical world, just like the rest of us.
Well, a story can also affect my internal world, if that’s your criteria of reality, yet I doubt you consider that as real as the physical world. Basically, according to your argument, there is already no distinction between physical and mental, which is the very reason I simply say it’s all mental. The reason I don’t call it all physical is because physical usually means “out there” and not “in here”. No, everything, absolutely everything, is “in here”. There is no “out there”. I perceive reality in this way. If you touch some outside directly that is amazing magic and a contradiction to any Logic I know.
It seems kind of like you can’t really accept that this is how I understand reality. I have a tip for you: others’ views will be much clearer to you if you don’t assume they’re lying about believing them. Maybe they really do see differently to you
There's a recent video you can search, a woman walking out the door of her apartment building. A young man sneaks up behind her and puts a bullet in her head. She died.
She didn't have to have any thought about the bullet. She didn't have to think ANYTHING about the physical world. Nothing about her state of mind affected the outcome.
Physical reality is independent of what we think of it.
> Maybe they really do see differently to you
I appreciate you think you see it differently. But your actions show you don't believe it as deeply as you think you do. You are a prisoner of the physical realm, not an inhabitant of a higher, more spiritual, plane. What good is it saying something is imaginary, if it affects everything you do, and you can't escape it. That sounds like something very real indeed.
I can’t really infer anything about the internal world of the woman. Also according to Buddhism the state of her mind would affect into which realm she was reborn after death, and arguably getting shot itself was a manifestation of her mental state. Yogachara philosophy of Buddhism says that all appearances of external reality is created by our internal world
The point of the video, is that she had zero awareness of the bullet. It all happened in 2 seconds without attracting her attention. I'm sure if you're honest, you can think of 1000 other examples as well.
Physical reality proceeds without your thoughts, it will continue after you and I die, it doesn't need our feelings or thoughts to exists and persist.
> Physical reality proceeds without your thoughts, it will continue after you and I die, it doesn't need our feelings or thoughts to exists and persist.
My belief is it is unfounded and ultimately based in narcissism.
"I am so important that I create the external reality, I really am
the center of the universe, it wouldn't exist without my mind"
It's an appeal to self-importance.
It can't account for something like the fossil record, that existed
before any human was on the planet; other than to say, "I dreamed
that up in my own special imaginary fiction!!"
Perhaps the primal nature of the world isn't physical matter, but
to pretend that we create reality with our mind, is not only silly,
it's dangerous and flies in the face of how everyone, even those
who claim to believe otherwise, actually act in the world.
Well, only deluded beings (including myself) act that way. Buddhas and bodhisattvas don’t. Indeed they can bend so called “physical reality” to their will, manifesting physical bodies and appearances in the minds of others. It’s just simply the following: form is emptiness, emptiness is form
That is NOT what the Buddha taught. It is expressly the opposite.
Promoting these types of wrong understandings really distract people from further learning.
This turns people away from further investigations that might help them.
People that might be aided in their suffering by learning more about buddhism, read some weirdness posted about "buddha can earth bend, whoooo, I learned about buddhism from watching Avatar, I'm a bender", and are completely turned away.
Read and meditate further before promoting something that is incorrect.
Yes he did, it’s in the Lotus sutra and Lankavatara sutras, to name two. Perhaps you’re a Pali canon fundamentalist or something but thats not my problem, what I’m saying is orthodox Mahayana: Buddhas can create bodies and are basically omnipotent in the Mahayana. The lotus sutra even says that the Buddha faked his appearance on this Earth so that the sravakas would have a nice narrative to believe in
Also the fact you said meditate makes me think you are quite ignorant about Buddhism. Most Buddhists don’t meditate, the idea that most do is a western misconception. I’m a pure land Buddhist, which is the most popular in the world, and we mainly engage in recitation and offerings and bowing
EDIT and I understand it may just be ignorance but it’s highly offensive to characterise traditional Mahayana Buddhist beliefs as some kind of children’s show. This is effectively slandering the Dharma
To tell people that buddhas have supernatural powers, and take that literally, is turning people away from the teaching.
'Faking' his appearance? Being omnipotent in this physical world? Able to manipulate this world?
You are supposed to understand that those are metaphors. Stories, not truth.
Language is imperfect and only points the way, not to be taken literally. A core teaching is how imperfect language is, and that even the sutras should be only taken as a rough guide and eventually abandoned when they no longer serve a purpose.
You can cite sutras, that doesn't mean you understand them. I fear that publishing these concepts as if an authority is damaging to people.
Meditate, prayer, recitation/mantras. Call it what you want.
Concentration/Samadhi is part of the 8-fold path.
That you would say that is not part of Buddhism is frankly making me think this whole thing is a Troll. Maybe you can make some argument that concentration in every moment is meditation, so you don't need to sit. But to say most Buddhist don't? Come on.
You know enough Buddhist terms to Troll someone on the internet. But this is damaging. Someone could read what you say and think that is Buddhism and be turned away or mislead.
Also, there is no such thing as slander to Buddhist, like there is some god in a Church that is taking offense. I guess we all get offended by things, and what I said was offensive, wrong speech. Just not technically 'slander'.
> Not even getting into the fact that mental states are already non physical
Conjecture, at best. All thought experiments purporting to show this non-physicality are deeply flawed. We literally have no reason to conclude that mental states are non-physical.
You're saying that people shouldn't be surprised that they're conscious. That may be true, but it's irrelevant to the argument I was talking about. The relevant fact there isn't merely that you're conscious, but that you are (consciously) the particular person that you are.
Bowsamic orignally posed a question that gets at the relevant fact: "Why am I me and not someone or something else?" However, the argument here doesn't rest on this question being puzzling. The argument is simply that the relevant fact of personal identity (whether puzzling or not) does not seem to reduce to any specifiable set of physical facts.
The form of the argument is exactly like a Platonist argument against physicalism: "2+2=4" is a fact and does not reduce to any set of physical facts; therefore not all facts are physical facts. This argument does not require the assumption that truths of arithmetic are surprising or difficult to explain. However, I think the irreducibility claim is more compelling in the case of personal identity than for mathematical truths.
To a physicalist, the only way to interpret the question "why am I me and not someone else?" is "why is my physical body identical to my physical body and not identical to another physical body?". The framework simply doesn't allow alternative interpretations. This interpretation is a tautology, because in the universe, things are identical to themselves, and only to themselves.
If you are using an abstract definition of "yourself" (such as your brain's internal representation of you), you are no longer talking about physical objects, so of course your question can't be answered using physical facts alone. Similarly, "2+2=4" is a statement about our abstract representation of the world, not the real world itself. That we can reason about integers without relying on facts about the real world doesn't mean that integers are any more "real" than unicorns - or for that matter, your concept of "self".
That's why it's a good argument against physicalism. According to what you just said, everything we ever experience is talking about "not the real world itself" according to physicalism, therefore why does it ever make sense to assert the "real world itself" over what we actually experience? It's like watching a movie and believing in the movie more than the fact you are sitting watching a screen.
> According to what you just said, everything we ever experience is talking about "not the real world itself"
I don't know how that follows from what I said. When someone says "the floor is slippery", that refers to a very much real physical property of a very much real thing. When someone says "the floor is lava", that means we're playing a game. We have no problem distinguishing between the two.
If you define yourself as the set of atoms that currently make you up, you are talking about the real world. If you define yourself as the set of your memories and experiences, you are not. The former definition has a lot less issues than the latter - firstly because you don't have to define anything further, you can just point at yourself; and secondly because a perfect clone of you would have the same set of memories and experiences, and that doesn't make them you. This is why "Why am I myself?" is much easier to answer when we're talking about your atoms. Now, if a theory can answer a question with ease, how is that question an argument against it? I've certainly never heard anyone say "If global warming is real, why are my car tires melting into the asphalt?".
> Now, if a theory can answer a question with ease, how is that question an argument against it?
Bowsamic may have a different take on this, but in my version of the argument, the point is not to answer the 'why' question. The 'why' question is just used to gesture at the relevant non-tautologous and apparently non-physical fact. So it doesn't really help with anything to redefine the terms of the question until it becomes a tautologous statement about atoms. All that shows is that physicalism doesn't have a problem with the concept of two physical things being the same thing – which isn't in dispute.
>If you define yourself as the set of atoms that currently make you up [...]
I don't see how I'm going to do this without some prior notion of who I am. Otherwise, one set of atoms is as good as any other.
> The 'why' question is just used to gesture at the relevant non-tautologous and apparently non-physical fact
Yeah, but to clearly define what that fact means, you'd have to introduce a bunch of intermediate definitions, and eventually you might just end up in physics-land again. It isn't physics' fault that the human brain is complicated.
> I don't see how I'm going to do this without some prior notion of who I am
Protip: if you pinch it and it hurts, it's probably yours :) Well, that or a very angry cat.
To be more serious: having prior notions of things is fine. Required, even. We can't reason about things without having at least a vague understanding of the language. It can't be turtles all the way down.
>and eventually you might just end up in physics-land again.
Sure, anything might turn out to be explicable by future physics (or indeed, future astrology, future phrenology, or any possible future knowledge). There are no knock-down arguments in this domain. The point is that the fact of your personal conscious identity is apparently not a physical fact, which is a prima facie argument against some of the stronger forms of physicalism.
>To be more serious: having prior notions of things is fine.
You can't use the physical definition to dispense with other notions of personal identity if you need those very notions to bootstrap the physical definition (and maintain it over time, as your 'set of atoms' is constantly changing). To point out that your informal notion of self is connected somehow with a loosely-defined lump of physical stuff isn't really to succeed in reducing anything to physics. It's just to say what pretty much everyone agrees with: that humans have physical bodies.
> You can't use the physical definition to dispense with other notions of personal identity if you need those very notions to bootstrap the physical definition
Now that you mention, I don't need to. "I" simply means "the person who is currently speaking" (or in this case, writing). This already determines, beyond reasonable doubt, which physical body we're talking about. No other definition needed, since you can't say "I" without speaking. QED. Sorry, I should have noticed this 4 comments earlier.
(Caveat: this definition doesn’t feel satisfying, which might be the source of our disagreement, but I can’t put my finger on why - perhaps you can)
> the fact of your personal conscious identity is apparently not a physical fact
The human brain is astonishingly good at BS-ing itself, so I wouldn't attribute much to how you intuitively feel about your own conscious self. To me, this smells like a more abstract and philosophical version of the puddle analogy.
> "I" simply means "the person who is currently speaking"
But on this definition you can raise the question of why the person who is currently speaking is the person who is currently speaking (which by alternating de re and de dicto interpretations can be understood in the same non-tautologous ways as e.g. "Why is the person who is currently the President the person who is currently the President?") So this linguistic analysis doesn't succeed in dissolving facts about personal identity into nothing. You still have the fact that you are who you are and not someone else. And the intuitive notion of personhood (on which your definition depends and which you haven't in any way reduced to physics) is intimately connected with the idea of a more-or-less uninterrupted stream of first-person conscious experience.
> I wouldn't attribute much to how you intuitively feel about your own conscious self.
If we set 'intuitive feelings' aside, then of course the whole problem of conscious experience disappears immediately.
> And the intuitive notion of personhood (on which your definition depends and which you haven't in any way reduced to physics) is intimately connected with the idea of a more-or-less uninterrupted stream of first-person conscious experience.
"person": a member of the genus Homo
"speaking": phenomenon wherein the previous object vibrates its own vocal chords and moves its own mouth to produce sound waves
"currently": a point in time in which the aforementioned act occurs
Notably missing are: any references to continuity of experience, conscious action, or even thought. Suggestion: I have, in fact, completely reduced it to physics.
> You still have the fact that you are who you are and not someone else
Please describe to me a hypothetical universe where that statement doesn't hold true. If there is none, then we must accept that this "fact" does not require any explanation, and therefore can be dismissed as trivial.
Your linguistic analysis of 'I' doesn't work if understood in purely physical terms. Lots of people are speaking at any given moment, but I don't refer to all of them if I say 'I'.
Consider the absurdity of the question “who am I?”, uttered by an amnesiac, if it means simply “Which lump of physical stuff is currently speaking?” Even if we ignore the problem mentioned in the first paragraph, the answer is trivial – the same lump that’s making the noises. But it’s difficult to accept that the amnesiac is confused over a triviality: they really don’t know who they are; they lack a key piece of non-trivial, non-tautologous knowledge.
>If there is none, then we must accept that this "fact" does not require any explanation
As I've tried to emphasise, I do not claim that the fact is puzzling or requires an explanation, only that it is a fact. By analogy, it is not puzzling that the sum of two and two is four, and no non-trivial explanation of this fact appears to be required, but it is still a fact. Now of course you can try to make such fact dissolve via various forms of philosophical therapy. For example, there are some philosophers of mathematics who would try to argue that all mathematical facts are tautologous. You are trying to do something similar with facts of personal identity. However, philosophers of mathematics who claim that all mathematical truths are disguised tautologies can point to lots of actual work that has been done to show that this position is more plausible than it might first appear.
> Consider the absurdity of the question “who am I?”, uttered by an amnesiac
In that context, that question would just mean "what was my life like prior to losing my memories?", wouldn't it? So in this instance, the missing non-trivial knowledge is their long-term memory, not a problem with understanding the definition of "I".
> For example, there are some philosophers of mathematics who would try to argue that all mathematical facts are tautologous. You are trying to do something similar with facts of personal identity.
I'm not arguing that the subjective experience of personal identity is tautologous, I'm arguing that it's a chemical reaction (EDIT: and that the underlying objective truth is tautologous). Any feeling about the intuitive concept of "myself" having some kind of esoteric component above the physical matter (which I also share, don't be mistaken) would, presumably, also be given voice to by a computer simulation of your brain. That would be your brain being caught red-handed in the act of lying to itself about how special it is. And if this turns out not to be the case, then we have rock solid evidence that something is indeed missing from our simulation, which gives us an opportunity to measure that something, which in turn makes that something physical.
> Your linguistic analysis of 'I' doesn't work if understood in purely physical terms. Lots of people are speaking at any given moment, but I don't refer to all of them if I say 'I'.
Valid point. Refinement: in any speech, "I" refers to the person making that speech.
I like the idea of ‘individuation’[0] where individual things (rocks, living bodies, minds, societies) come into being from their preindividual environment. As I understand this idea, it is just that a mind individuates within a body, and that mind comes to call itself ‘I’. So it’s not that we existed before a mind individuated, but rather we come to find ourself recognizing ourself as ‘I’ after individuating.
Maybe your consciousness does sometimes occupy other bodies. Of course you don't remember it, because memory and working memory are tied to brains. When consciousness is in another body, it feels that it is another person with his memories and context and none of yours.
Another way of saying this is that there's no need to postulate separate consciousness for separate people, one is enough.
Experiments done on corpus callosotomy patients [0] give us some very interesting insights on how consciousness works. IMO, these experiments strongly point towards consciousness being mostly, if not entirely, an illusion created by the brain.
I knew about similar split brain experiments, and although I agree to the illusory component of consciousness, these nonetheless do not answer my original question on the observing component of it. Thank you for sharing!
I was referring to the observing component itself being an illusion (as a split-brain patient seemingly has two of those). If that component is also a byproduct of physical processes, then your “observer” being attached to your body is self-evident.
If I stand up too quickly or hold my breath, it's consciousness that I start to lose, not my consciousness's control of my body. It seems to me that implies consciousness comes from the brain.
Yeah not far removed from the fungible soul concept
Built from the same shaky foundation and shared desire for it to exist
One hit upside the head and you’re a completely different person. (Or dietary change with different microbacteria, or following heavy psychedelics use, etc…)
I would love nothing more than to not be special, the only solutions that I can conceive of for the hard problem of conscience are ones that requires something other than the physical. Either there is a soul or conscience is just inherent to the universe(the whole everything has a conscience theory) neither of these is particularly satisfying to me if for no other reason than they are both unfalsifiable. I would love for there to be an available algorithm that my brain could compute that would spit out conscience.
But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The brain could theoretically do anything it does from information processing, problem solving, planning or even develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the visual information of red light hitting your eyes to "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done over years of thinking about this bullshit problem.
The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain, but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up with that "something".
the other way of thinking about it is that we don't know if we share a sense of "red", aside from merely being consistent with other compatible nodes (other humans) in a network. the other node simply can distinguish "red" from "green" just like I can, but we don't know if they are perceiving that color the same way I am. whether it is a hardware difference in the rods, cones, other aspect of the eye, or computational aspect in the brain, we don't know.
your supposition still relies on their being a separate entity to imagine, quantify or figure out, when that is not necessary. a tribunal of processes is enough for this "observer" phenomenon.
Perhaps it isn't well-defined, but I initially thought of it as something atomic and immutable (even in the face of brain damage), and now I no longer do.
I don't have an answer to offer, but anecdotal memories of reading somewhere that brains could be a sort of antenna for consciousness. Then a subsequent comment explaining how if that were the case we would fall unconscious in a faraday cage.
I wouldn't take the leap into the Faraday cage so easily, that would imply that consciousness is measurable in the electromagnetic field. I don't think that's true, otherwise we would have measured it already. I don't know where to go next on this reasoning, it seems like we don't have the tools to measure in which field we are communicating.
That line of reasoning seems pretty silly given that consciousness is supposed to be much more subtle than electromagnetic fluctuations and omnipresent, but it reminds me of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition where the most difficult practices are only done deep in mountain caves where no light can reach the practitioner. I wouldn't be at all surprised if minimizing cosmic background radiation was a factor in sufficiently subtle inner inquiry.
One of my ancient aliens theories is that the Pyramids are artificial mountain caves.
Brain antennae + consciousness is more complex than just brain consciousness. In the former, we still have to answer "so... what is consciousness then? where is it? how does it couple to the brain? can it be blocked?" In the latter, it's just "consciousness is a property of a brain", and we are only left with the question of how the brain produces it. The antenna theory is just multiplying entities unnecessarily.
> why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none.
Are you sure this is a well-formed question? To be clear, this isn't what the hard problem of consciousness is about, although perhaps that's what you meant by "none".
The question you raise is fascinating. I ask the same questions when I think about the many-worlds interpretation in QM.
As for the research in focus in this thread, It seems that we are facing another Great Humiliation[0], with the potential to affect the course of development in so many other areas.
It will be interesting to see what developments this research will inspire in the cultural/anthropological field: so were the tree-huggers right all along? So is there really a harmony and connection between all the "children of Gaia"? :)
The only "scientific" explanation that makes sense to me is that consciousness spans time and space, where each focal point of attention is an aspect of a central whole, like a lifetime within a fractal of lifetimes stemming from when source (God) consciousness fractured itself to experience every viewpoint within the universe to avoid an eternity alone. It created what we experience as the shared (objective) reality from the original singularity that came into existence from the number line via the long tail of the quantum probability distribution. The concept of something from nothing is maybe the foundation of consciousness itself, since science may never be able to explain the subjective experience of conscious awareness or how it came to be.
As a thought experiment, imagine we could emulate the corpus callosum between brain hemispheres through a computer chip, and had the medical technology to split someone in half. There have been cases where people have lost a brain hemisphere before birth or due to an accident but continued leading relatively normal lives, so we know that such a division is plausible.
Before separation, we'd experience being an individual.
At the moment of separation, our consciousness would anchor to one of the hemispheres we'll call "A". We'd see our other half "B" pull away and look back at us in curiosity as it continues experiencing its own consciousness. The other half B is still our consciousness, but anchored to a different point in spacetime. The halves would begin accruing their own memories independently, but act like the original individual for quite some time or even a lifetime.
At the moment of reunification, we'd see B approaching and then experience a download where our memories suddenly contain more than they did a moment ago. We might even experience "hearing" the other half as another person until the merging is complete. But afterwards we'd still be the same individual we always were, just with new narratives running in the code of our mental model, built from the memories acquired while separated. This experience is identical for the other half, except seen from its own context.
Warning (spoilers): This is analogous to a Vulcan mind meld, although it's unclear from Star Trek whether minds maintain their individuality or become a single consciousness. Because Spock's consciousness existed separately within McCoy until he was reincarnated, I tend to think that the show took the society of mind approach where our thoughts maybe come from a collection of simpler agents, meaning that Spock's anchor transferred to McCoy when they separated, so both their anchors shared one mind for a time, and Spock would have been in McCoy while he was asleep and his partial (a term borrowed from Eon by Greg Bear) B died in the warp chamber.
But I think the hemisphere splitting thought experiment is more useful because it sheds insight on reincarnation and the multiverse. It also helps us step up to 4D/5D and consider what it subjectively feels like to straddle realities as we shift laterally through spacetime rather than waiting for events to unfold in forward (linear) time. Insight and downloads might come from our consciousness constantly splitting and reuniting from other timelines as it explores possible future outcomes in the quantum probability distribution.
That might shed light on how the inner mind seemingly affects outer reality by overcoming the odds to survive via affecting probability itself (the principle of manifestation). In other words, it's likely that there is always an anchor, since quantum reality can't exist without an observer (consciousness), so an individual sees unlikely events whose odds of happening are so remote that science can only call them coincidences (synchronicities).
That would mean that our souls always continue, even if our physical bodies die, by straddling another reality where a body for us still exists. We may experience an infinite, continuous, individual timeline spanning countless lifetimes over billions of years, interspersed with long periods of nonexistence that we have no way to remember. And each time we die, the people around us can no longer be with us, since our anchor is no longer in their reality.
And it's unclear whether our soul can reincarnate in simpler life forms or if our complexity keeps evolving as our soul ascends. Dreams and psychedelic accounts seem to lean towards the idea of a lizard brain, where consciousness can exist unfiltered. So that it may be that we are allowed to "choose" our next incarnation during unconscious periods and "opt in" to a 3D experience like here on Earth to experience the novelty of suffering.
The main takeaway is that since those around us are aspects of ourselves, then egocentric narcisism is a refusal to see the big picture. If we act to enrich ourselves by exploiting others, we karmically doom ourselves to more suffering in our next life. Our old A becomes the resource-hoarding enemy of our new B. Making a deal with the devil may feel good, but it's like being the top inmate in a prison, starving the soul of real connection. So the meek and pious spiral out towards peace/connection/heaven while the rich and powerful spiral in towards their own violence/loneliness/hell.
I haven't read this, but I think it leans more towards the objective side, where multiple consciousnessness would occupy a single mind, more like schizophrenia than a fractal split from a single source consciousness:
And of course all of this could be completely wrong. But it's all derived from first principles and a collection of insights from the spiritual community that seem to keep resonating and expanding in this post-pandemic era entering the New Age. We may not know until we meet aliens who have performed these experiments. But it provides a useful framework to explore the idea of consciousness existing in higher dimensions and even visiting us through the paranormal/supernatural (magical) experiences we all have as conscious aware beings.
Another benefit is that consciousness affecting probablity means that time travel is not possible, since any repeat scenario is a copy of the original and subject to random outcomes. The same events can never be replayed exactly the same way twice. Many vocal people in the scientific community have arrived at the conclusion that free will doesn't exist, which self-evidently defies our subjective experience, but they're basing that on the fallacy that time travel is possible.
The impossibility of time travel is maybe the best (albiet weak) explanation we have for consciousness and free will. It's how our timeless nature steps down from 4D/5D to experience a timeline, similarly to how a photon doesn't experience time since it's moving at the speed of light. There may only be one photon in the whole universe, creating a 4D holographic "crystal" encoding everything here. The mutable state of our consciousness is kind of like the in-between times when pure functional programming blocks to wait for new input, with the deterministic portion running unconsciously. An android would have mutable state, while a robot would mostly run hardcoded logic.
Which is why I don't subscribe to the idea that humans are just AIs running in complex robots, or that this is a simulation. Although if we substitute the word dream instead, then it all begins to make sense again. There's no matrix or holodeck that created the simulation, it's more like source consciousness projects the simulation to give us something to do. And of course there's no way to prove any of this, it's just a descriptive model that may lead to deeper insights.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, I found myself nodding along until the very end. I subscribe, so far, to the idea that we might simply be fragments of a fundamental consciousness, but it still remains a bit frightening to me (despite its lack of effect on my way of living) that we may never find the ‘root’ of it all.
I also agree to the connection between the karmic ‘field’ and our consciousness, and I sometimes feel like I am simply guiding an observing vector across all possibilities, collapsing the wave functions along time. Other commenters in the thread have done a better job articulating that aspect than me, however!
Thank you for replying, that means a lot. I winced after posting that, like I mostly do now when engaging online, because so much of it is subjective and changing that I struggle to consistently articulate these thoughts and the length gets out of control. One of the first rules of Zen is that there's no way to tell someone what enlightenment is, it can only be sought individually. Because letting go of attachments and giving others the dignity to find their own path is one of the first steps. I'm thrilled that you found things to disagree with, as that suggests that there is still much more for me to learn from others like yourself.
For what it's worth, I wrote that long rant for my 25 year old self going through an exceptionally painful time in his life. I hope someone finds some value in it, even if simply to forgive others and ourselves, and find gratitude for the miracle of life. Even when things feel so terribly unfair that just surviving these human trials amounts to an act of heroism.
I found myself nodding along until the very end. <- I may have misread this as disagreeing with simulation vs dream-based reality, so I should have said I'm thrilled IF you found things to disagree with, definitely plenty of room for interpretation!
I know this is a disliked point of view, but for me the yogic point of view really gave me a mental picture in which this all makes perfect sense and which is quite consistent in itself (even though there is an unexplained axiom which is: "Intelligent-Awareness just is")
I feel that is what was termed the dreadful g-o-d word by many cultures but if we can understand this under that light, the readings of the second ever yogi that came to the west called Paramhansa Yogananda are highly recommended.
His Autobiography of a Yogi was Steve Jobs favorite book and he made everyone that attended his funeral to get a copy of it. Not that that means a whole lot, as he was by far not an embodiment of love, but I feel he had the capacity to see the brilliance in this undestanding.
