On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:59 AM, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi soulcatcher, > Good question, it is something I thought about too, then I realized I am me > because it was this brain in my skull asking that question. I created the > attached image to help illustrate my point. If each person asks that > question "why am I me?" another way of phrasing their question is "Why am I > seeing the universe from this perspective and not someone else's?" If you > follow the thought bubbles in the picture you see it leads to a head which > is connected to a specific pair of eyes, it would only be natural that the > individual isolated brains only remember seeing from one person's > perspective, and just as natural for them to be curious about that fact. > However when looked at from this perspective the answer seems quite > obvious.
It's definitely not obvious for me ) If I understand you right, you're trying to answer the question from 3-d person view, but I really don't see how subjective 1-st person experience could emerge from (or be reduced to) 3-d person description of this experience. I'm comfortable with the thought that other people aren't zombies and ask the same questions as I do, but I still don't understand why I'm having this 1-st person experience but not that. > Another more interesting question: How do you know you aren't also > perceiving those other people's perspectives too? Obviously no individual > brain remembers the thoughts or experiences of the others because there are > no neural connections between them (like split brain patients who develop > two egos) but just because you don't remember experiencing something doesn't > mean you didn't experience it. I always thought that my consciousness (and qualia, 1-st person experience) is by definition the perspective that I'm not only having right now but knowing that I'm having it (here I strongly agree with Damasio that consciousness is not separable from the knowing about the feeling). Therefore, by definition, I'm not perceiving those other people's perspectives - because If I perceived them, I would have known that, these perspectives would be not their but my perspective - but they are not. Moreover, this is the only thing that I'm sure about - cause my perspective is the one and the only perspective I know. Bruno Marchal said (and I really love this quote): "Any content of consciousness can be an illusion. Consciousness itself cannot, because without consciousness there is no more illusion at all. " In the other words, I can say that my 1-st person perspective cannot be an illusion and, as the other people's perspectives aren't part of it, I'm sure that I'm not perceiving them... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
