On 06 Aug 2014, at 03:48, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/5/2014 11:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 04 Aug 2014, at 21:17, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/4/2014 11:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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.
We don't lose consciousness when asleep.
I agree. Glad you agree with this.
I don't wake up when my clock strikes the hour, but I wake up
instantly when my wife whispers "I heard a noise."
I use often ear-plug, as I could ear (and wake up) the pin falling
in the forest nearby (exaggeration included).
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.
Even people who are said to suffer amnesia still remember how to
speak and they remember the immediate past so that this provides
continuity.
Not in a salvia experience. On high dose you can forget basically
everything, which explains the quite "retarded" look of the
experiencer, which indeed can't no more talk, and forget even
notion of person and time. You might not even remember having ever
had a body.
That's just what you remember of the experience.
Yes.
That's true for all experience, we can believe only in what we
remember from it. But an amnesic who recover memory can remember its
amnesic period. With salvia you can remember that you did forget
basically everything, + the memory that we get back to our normal
usual state, as life looks like an evanescent dreams. The familiarity
strikes only when we come back. From there it is were we really
belong, since "no time". When we come back, it is like falling asleep,
and resuming a dream.
(It is of course not a good idea to take such dosage, especially
for the first time (and nobody does that except those who are
interested in making a funny youtube video).
Interesting research now suggests that specific memories can be
erased by giving a person a drug that prevents formation of long
term memory and having them recall the specific memory to be
erased while under the influence of the drug.
Interesting.
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.
Is there any other meaning to "being a person" beyond memories and
consciousness and body?
Yes. Paying taxes, marriage, funeral, etc.
When supported by deep (long, and linear) histories person have
more and more sophisticate lives, which are like novel/movies,
except "you" are the "hero". The basic scenario is what the hero do
for not being eaten, and what he does for eating, and usually some
mating problem are involved.
Those are other things a person can do, but the question was what
provides the "meaning" or essence of being a person. Can person
have no memory, no consciouness, and no location?
No. A person always mean a soul, or a first person. It needs no
memory, nor locations, but it needs consciousness.
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.
Free will is just not knowing what you will do next.
On the contrary, I would say that free will is in the ability of
deciding what you will do next.
Yet if it's predictable people think it's not "free".
Well, they are wrong. They have a mythical inconsistent idea of "free
will", with or without comp. I agree on Clark on this, but I don't
follow his invalid extrapolation that free-will makes no sense. Only
that sort of free will makes no sense.
Bruno
Brent
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