On 15 May 2014 04:33, Dennis Ochei <[email protected]> wrote: > But that's exactly the point. Consciousness, if construed as the container > of conscious experience (or the surface upon which experience is > written) has no principle of individuation--all conscious experiencers > abstracted from their experience are identical. For this reason a > consciousness swap is as meaningless as swapping the location of two > electrons or shifting the universe 6 feet to the left. This is not at all > the route Kolak takes to his conclusion, but suffices as a quick exposition > of why one would entertain the position. In short, patterns (complex > organisms) emerge in the universe that allow the universe to be conscious > of itself. All consciousness is one part of the universe experiencing > another part of itself as other. > > Course, one could also take the position that there is no experiencer > independent of the experience. The experiencer and the experienced are > one. In which case you are identical solely with yourself right this > moment, and what will wake up in your bed tomorrow will not be you, but > something that is merely like you in many ways. Under this view you now and > you tomorrow are different persons. This is the view pushed by Parfit. >
I am sympathetic to Parfit's view, but it doesn't change the way I feel about things. For example, to be consistent I shouldn't care if I die, since I die anyway even if my tomorrow self seems to persist; however, I do care if I die. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
