soulcatcher☠ wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:59 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> 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...
The "illusion" is not the perspective; it's the "I".
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
|
