On 05/01/2006, at 5:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
It is an accident of evolution that we consider our future selves
to be the "same" person as we are now and try to ensure their well-
being.
Biological imperatives are present and at work here. It may be an
accident of evolution that we have a sense of self at all. Not all
life forms have self-awareness. A consciousness of death appears to
be what renders a psyche active in terms of seeing things framed by
past present and future. Memory may not depend entirely on a
conscious mind but memory is certainly much longer in beings with a
grasp of time. An insect probably has little or no experience of time
because it is dubious that it has an awareness of death. Yet, insects
appear to devote their entire lives to ensuring the well-being of
their future selves. The selfish gene principle governs most of what
goes on - we are replicators whose minds favour behaviours leading to
our survival
They might be made up of completely different matter to us, have
only inaccurate memories of what we are experiencing now, and have
only a vaquely similar sense of self
It would be no logical contradiction if we believed that our life
effectively ended when we went to sleep each night, and accordingly
used up all our resources today with no regard for the person who
will wake up in our bed tomorrow
We don't think that way because people who did would have died out,
but with a little effort it is possible to imagine sentient
species with notions of continuity of individual identity very
different from our own.
How ironic - but don't we live *as though* this were true? Don't
humans live in general as though there are "no tomorrows" and use up
all the resources today with no regard etc. It seems with a conscious
self-awareness we are at the greedy, destructive and subsequently
doomed other end of the spectrum to the insect with it's clearly
triumphant altruistic oblivion. In that we experience a linear time
in our heads we apparently must seek and define an "end time" for our
individual lives if not our entire civilization based on the
respect / fear of the death event. This seems quintessentially
human...other sentient beings as you say might have observer moments
devoid of our egoic sense of self that seems so easily extinguishable
by a death event.
Kim Jones
