On 04 Aug 2014, at 02:09, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/3/2014 4:27 PM, Kim Jones wrote:
On 4 Aug 2014, at 5:46 am, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
What about "multiple personality disorder" ? Are they the same
person? (I'd guess not)
Why? There is a weaker, culturally acceptable version of this in
the concept of the "parallel lives" we all lead. Now don't tell me
you are all just one identity. You don't necessarily have to be one
of the British House of Lords to like the whips and the leathers
and the Nazi uniforms during sex, yet a paragon of moderation
humility and chastity in your day job - sorry that's just an
example, I'm sure your imaginations can do better. Nobody is "just
one person". Life offers us all roles to play. De Bono felt this
was one area where human perception was at its finest. You can have
all sorts of relationships with other people. Each one of these
relationships is a kind of universe, a life, a computational
stream. It has its own identity. Why limit yourself to just one?
They are *roles* and they are *played* by one person; that's what
makes them roles. What makes the person one is consistency of
memories and interactions.
OK. But you can lose your memories progressively, and staying
consistent all along. Intuitively, influenced by the night sleep, we
might think that when we lose our memories, we loose consciousness.
But there are no physiological evidences for this, on the contrary,
the study of brain deficient people accounts, willingly through drugs
or unwillingly through accidents or diseases, suggests the contrary.
Now, when you don't loose consciousness, you survive, in the sense of
staying alive. Loosing a memory is typically a sad events, but loosing
a leg or an hand are too, yet you survive. It is not your "end" (if
that exists).
And I believe that there is no consciousness without a person, as
consciousness is an attribute of a first person.
Owning memories and bodies are other different attribute of some
possible person.
And as you say, like in a novel, our memories confer us some role;
which we play, as if it was our job or something. Usually this
represent some value, as we hope, and our identity, social or human
identity, is not so much in the memories, but in what we do with those
memories, with respect to the value we believe in.
Then salvia, but also meditation or sleep technics, gives the quite
platonist feeling that those value transcend you, are universal,
already known by the "higher self" (perhaps the universal person), and
that eventually, in your many "incarnations/implementations" "you"
have the choice to let those values living through you, or not. I
guess people aware of those value get "bad conscience" when they acts
against them. Bad faith might originate from that too. Free will is
probably related to that ability of betraying your own conscience.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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