JohnLockeOctober 08, 2018 at 11:4021925 views69 comments
A popular question. Why am I me? Why am I not the person next to me? When I die, will I be another person in the past or future? Was I another person before I was born? If so, why am I not everyone?
Comments (69)
Andrew4HandelOctober 08, 2018 at 12:03#2187920 likes
I agree that why we are the specific person or consciousness we are is a deep puzzle.
How do you come to inhabit this one particular conscious sphere out of billions that exist and have existed.
I view it as a central issue in the study of consciousness.
A popular question. Why am I me? Why am I not the person next to me? When I die, will I be another person in the past or future? Was I another person before I was born? If so, why am I not everyone?
You are you as a result of a dynamic combination of nature and nurture, a deterministic result.
You are not the person next to you because the person next to you has a different set of deterministic results than you do. When you die, you will not be anyone, past, future or present.
Before you were born, you were not a person (or if you prefer, pick your own cut off point during your mothers pregnancy).
Who are the "I" and "me" of which you speak? And how do you know they are one and the same?
Andrew4HandelOctober 08, 2018 at 20:01#2188750 likes
I have raised a similar issue to this myself. It is a location issue. Where am "I" located and how?
I don't believe I am identical with my brain but I experience a united location as the centre of experiences.
I am always at the centre of experiences and they are located around me. There is a continuation of myself as I travel say from the UK to Australia as the experiences and landscapes change..
It could just be the same location as my brain but still the question is how does my particular self awareness at this location in time and space arise? Why didn't other brains or bodies become my location?
In a related issue I believe perception is solipsistic and we only know and perceive through ourself there is no objective access tor reality.
There is also a causal of issue of what caused "me".
"A thing is identical with itself."-There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which is yet
connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted".
Reply to StreetlightX Yes, indeed, it is not saying anything, but perhaps showing something.
The feeling of bewilderment in the OP derives from a poorly phrased question. The corresponding statement, "I am who I am", might be seen as a definition, or a reinforcement, of one's identity; and hence be of some use in cases of a crisis...
Reply to Banno No I couldn't, that would be impossible. As I am always me (construing 'me' as the objective form of 'I') and could be nothing else. However it is possible (at east logically, if not practically) that I could be someone other than bert1.
However it is possible (at east logically, if not practically) that I could be someone other than bert1.
Can you make sense of this? "In some possible world, Bert is not Bert"?
It might mean: Bert, in the actual world, might in some possible world, not be called Bert.
That's not a problem. It just says you have a different name.
But it can't mean, for example, that the person who is Bert in the actual world might have been Banno in another possible world (taking Bert and Banno as rigid designators).
SO the ball is in your court. What sense is there in supposing that you might not be who you are?
And that is why it is a grammatical muddle. It asks nothing.
A popular question. Why am I me? Why am I not the person next to me? When I die, will I be another person in the past or future? Was I another person before I was born? If so, why am I not everyone?
What makes a ''person'', if that is what you mean by ''I''?
Per logic one is a specific person based on difference. The genus-difference mode of definition comes to mind.
To achieve an indentity, uniqueness if you will, one has to be different enough from the rest. Otherwise you wouldn't be you but someone else.
Take two cars of the same make. They are identical and so don't have that uniqueness that would give them an identity that could then beget the question ''why am I me and not someone else?''
So, if you want to know yourself look for differences between you and others.
In that enterprise one may realize that differences that make you you and not someone else are very superficial. Every one has two eyes, two ears, one nose, etc. Even thinking-wise one finds an ilk that share your deepest thoughts.
So, it seems, at least to me, that there is no ''I'' unique enough to make sense of the question ''why am I me and not you?''
That said, we may need to consider something else to answer your question with any degree of meaningfulness.
Andrew4HandelOctober 09, 2018 at 11:14#2190920 likes
I am one of six children. I am the 4th of six children my parents had and this is who I am aware of being. Other specifics include being male and born in the late 1970's UK.
There are obviously many different conscious subjective locations but I ended up in this precise one out of all the alternative consciousnesses "being "created".
So what makes someone suddenly become aware of being one precise person?
Conscious has the effect of making you somehow occupy just one persons body arbitrarily.
The causal chain of the body is explicable from DNA copied and passing on systematically through space and time with some alternations but consciousness is something new not passed on like that and it is the only part of the entity that is aware and is even not describable in physicalist terms .
I think deliberate failure to accurately describe consciousness or denial of self and conscious states is simply a position of gross ignorance and delusion. The equivalent of a backward fundamentalist religion creating a perpetual dark ages and state of irrationality.
I think questions like why am I conscious of being a human and not a whale are perfectly valid also. If whales are conscious that is another conscious location that was open to be inhabited.
Michael OssipoffOctober 09, 2018 at 19:29#2191550 likes
A popular question. Why am I me? Why am I not the person next to me?
.
If you were someone else, then you wouldn’t be you. It wouldn’t be meaningful to speak of a “you” who is someone else.
.
Why are you in a life? You’re in a life because of yourself. …because you’re the protagonist in a life-experience possibility-story, one of the infinitely-many such hypothetical stories, each of which consists of a complex system of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things. …hence my statement that you’re the reason why you’re in a life.
.
When I die, will I be another person in the past or future?
.
You’ll be another person, similar to the person you are now, but not necessarily in the past, present or future of this physical world. More likely in a different physical world…but most likely in one that is quite similar to this one.
.
Was I another person before I was born?
.
Probably, yes. Why do I say that? Because it seems to me that no one would get into a societally-bad world like this one in their first life. It would take a few lives to get into this much of a moral/ethical snarl.
.
If so, why am I not everyone?
.
The nature of being a person is to be a particular person. Why are you the one that you are? Everyone’s life-experience story “is there” timelessly, as a hypothetical life-experience story. You’re in this life, in this world, as the person that you are, because those are the conditions of one of those infinitely-many experience-stories. In other words, the person that you are is part of this experience-story, as its protagonist. The person that you are goes with this story. This is the story of the experiences of that person, the person that you are, the protagonist of that story.
.
All the other life-experience stories “are there” too. But of course it goes without saying that this one is about the particular person that is you.
.
Michael Ossipoff
The obvious answer is that “you” are a developing process, an enduring structure. Not a thing, but a historically conditioned continuity.
So is a process identical with itself? That requires a whole different metaphysical perspective. The parts can change. What matters is that some essential set of constraints are satisfied. The child becomes the adult and is both the same person and a different person.
The question of identity or individuation sounds silly. But it leads into exactly the kind of deep question metaphysics needs to have good answers for.
Is one of the characteristics of existence self-assertion? And, if so, does it explain why I am me? Coz I feel like there's a part of me which constantly declares itself, perhaps as a sum of all the influence I exert, or as the sum of every aspect of awareness which I influence and which influences me (consciously and sub-consciously).
Reply to JohnLocke
"A popular question. Why am I me? Why am I not the person next to me? When I die, will I be another person in the past or future? Was I another person before I was born? If so, why am I not everyone?"
The answer depends on one's positions on identity and essentialism.
Does a car maintain the same identity over time? Is it the same car if the oil gets changed? New tires? New engine and transmission? What, if anything, is essential to the car's identity?
Similarly, what is essential to a human's identity? DNA doesn't even stay constant over time?
I don't know where I am in the universe or in a body or a material word.
We are probably on separate sides of this world wherever it is but maybe we are actually on separate planets light years away?
ForgottenticketOctober 10, 2018 at 16:28#2195070 likes
Your conscious phenomenal experience is a special snowflake. People have different phenomenal features to you. I never thought this was a difficult question for materialism. The harder question is addressing how it appears binded together.
Limitless ScienceOctober 10, 2018 at 20:06#2195290 likes
My topic about why is there anything at all could help you out at this. If you understand it of course!
Eden-AmadorOctober 10, 2018 at 20:11#2195320 likes
Even if the story if who one is might be determined by social and psychological conditions, to describe it in such simplistic terms crushes the soul.
Everyone has a story to tell. But if we make sense of our stories in ways that radically change the way we behave and reach into the "universals of the historical moment" (totally just made that phrase up, email me if you want to know what I think I mean when I say this) then our stories reach out to others in similar circumstances and open up options and ways of beings which hadn't existed before consciousness.
Can you make sense of this? "In some possible world, Bert is not Bert"?
Crucially, that's not what I said! I said that I might not be bert1. This is exactly what is at stake, whether the words 'I' and 'bert1' have the same meaning, or perhaps referent, or not, and under what circumstances. And whether this is a grammatical or metaphysical issue.
Metaphysically, I take the view that consciousness (bear with me with the 'c' word, this is relevant) is not complex. There are not different kinds of it. By contrast, the content of consciousness, namely what we are aware of, admits of limitless complexity and variety. In my metaphysics there is a duality between the observer and the observed; they are not the same thing. The observer is not an object in the world. I know you don't agree with this and I'm not trying to argue for it here. The point is that there is a metaphysical assumption behind my language use, such that the referent of 'I' and 'bert1' can be separated under some circumstances. For the purpose of this thread, a question like 'Why am I bert1?' can be made sense of by separating the referents of 'I' and 'bert1', such that I do not gibber. By 'I' I mean consciousness (in this context) and by 'bert1' I mean a certain set of content to that consciousness.
However, if you take a different metaphysical view, in which there is no separation between observer and observed, and no metaphysical difference between the referent of 'I' (when bert1 is speaking) and 'bert1', then indeed, any such questions such as 'Why am I bert1?' is rendered vacuous, based on a grammatical muddle. And I take it this is your view.
Do you agree, then, that there is a metaphysical element to this issue, not just a grammatical one?
Perhaps you think that the grammatical error causes the metaphysical error?
(I don't want to persuade you you are wrong about the metaphysics, just that you are wrong to say this is a grammatical problem rather than a metaphysical one).
That is not to say that people who ask such questions are never muddled about grammar, they might be I suppose, but I think it far more likely that they simply have different metaphysical assumptions that make sense of their utterances.
Pattern-chaserOctober 11, 2018 at 09:55#2196730 likes
Reply to Andrew4Handel Because I am what I am not, and am not what I am. I do not know myself but I know Others, which are Other because of their radical alterity of being, inaccessible as an object of conscious absorption, knowledge or identification. I know that I am because I understand that I am nobody else. I realize nobody else is me, and thus I am, but am always escaping this tendency or inclination to define, and encircling experience itself to be me. I am the principle of the series of manifestations and expressions, the alterity of that which it is capable of having an effect upon.
(I don't want to persuade you you are wrong about the metaphysics, just that you are wrong to say this is a grammatical problem rather than a metaphysical one).
I will maintain that the issue is grammatical.
Consider what would happen if you were not Bert1, but were Bert2. Then, you suppose, "Why am I Bert 2, and not Bert1?" would be a genuine metaphysical question. Indeed, for any n, "Why am I Bert(n)?" must for you be a genuine metaphysical question.
However, it just follows from being Bert(n), that you are Bert(n). There is nothing here to explain.
The point is that there is a metaphysical assumption behind my language use, such that the referent of 'I' and 'bert1' can be separated under some circumstances.
Can we seperate the consciousness of Bert1 from Bert1? I don't understand how. The suggestion is that the Bert1's consciousness is seperate from Bert1's experiences. This involves somehow extracting an essence of Bert1's consciousness from what Bert experiences.
A side line, worth considering, is that consciousness admits of degree, from deep sleep through dreams and wakefulness to being utterly focused...
Indeed, I'm not sure how one could conceive of consciousness apart from being conscious of such-and-such. How to move from consciousness of this or that, to consciousness itself?
Deep meditative states might appear to be an obvious example; but I will maintain that a deep meditative state is not consciousness of nothing, but consciousness of being conscious.
Indeed, we all experience consciousness of nothing - Deep sleep; but this is not being conscious, it is just the opposite - being unconscious.
Reply to Ciceronianus the White "You may not be you" is equivalent to saying "the law of non-contradiction may be false". i.e you=you is necessarily true.
At any rate, the concept of identity needs to be well defined before any analysis can be done.
CiceronianusOctober 15, 2018 at 16:52#2205360 likes
Reply to Relativist My little comment was meant for JohnLocke, not you. And it was intended to be silly, I'm afraid.
However, it just follows from being Bert(n), that you are Bert(n). There is nothing here to explain.
Sure, but only with certain assumptions. The assumptions are that 'Bert1' or 'Bert2' is not vague and does not vary in its meaning, nor the entity that it designates, which may be fine assumptions for most purposes. But for many speakers these assumptions are not always made in certain contexts. Consider Barney, who believes in reincarnation. Barney says "Phew, I might have been a snail. I could have been a snail had I not done that good deed in a previous life. I am Barney, rather than Sammy the Snail, because I did the right thing."
Barney might be mistaken or deluded in his metaphysics, but is he literally gibbering? I think not. He is making perfectly good sense on the assumption that his most essential self is his soul and his body is more of a happy accident. You understand what he means don't you?
Barney says "Phew, I might have been a snail. I could have been a snail had I not done that good deed in a previous life. I am Barney, rather than Sammy the Snail, because I did the right thing."
This is a real problem for reincarnation. The unanswered question is, what is it that was reincarnated as barney, and not as a snail? There is no reasonable answer to this, and so much the worse for the notion of reincarnation. Hence:
Let's pretend that what soul means is a particular configuration of neuronal structures as memories and dispositions of a purely physical, structural nature, such that it can be emulated by a computer. Then Bert2 is a recording of Bert1 uploaded to a class III robot with enhanced philosophy circuits, such that when it asks, "why am I me?", we can give a meaningful answer along the lines that Bert1 was a millionaire determined to cheat death, and Bert2 is the result. And of course that also explains why both of them think they are Napoleon.
Daniel GibbonsOctober 27, 2018 at 20:35#2228930 likes
I exist therefore I am. I continue to just be.
ArguingWAristotleTiffOctober 27, 2018 at 21:02#2229010 likes
Because only you can be you and I can only be me.
Entertaining the idea of two of me gives Aristotle a headache. :wink: And before the obvious is pointed out to me, Aristotle would not be alone in his headaching. :joke:
Daniel GibbonsOctober 27, 2018 at 22:47#2229330 likes
If Bert1 is a rigid designator that refers to you, then you cannot be other than Bert1.
Which me? The bert1 I refer to when I refer just to my consciousness, or the bert1 I refer to when I refer to the flesh-memory complex you can take a photo of?
If you reject that distinction that's fine, but that just means we have different metaphysics, not different grammars, no?
ArguingWAristotleTiffOctober 29, 2018 at 15:32#2231910 likes
The same question was asked, and the same question can be asked, and a sensible answer proposed under other assumptions. For example @Sam26 might answer something like '...that is the life that you chose in the spirit world, as the most suitable for your education and development'. ( My apologies if I have put words into his mouth he objects to, but it is something of the sort that people do suggest in good faith, and it seems meaningful, if unjustifiable.) My particular previous example was intended to remove all trace of otherworldliness, but there seems no necessity to do so, except to pander to the sceptical.
Terrapin StationNovember 01, 2018 at 21:13#2240800 likes
Not that I'm a Randian, but because A=A. In other words, per logical identity/the identity of indiscernibles and the non-identity of discernibles, things are themselves and not something else.
Comments (69)
How do you come to inhabit this one particular conscious sphere out of billions that exist and have existed.
I view it as a central issue in the study of consciousness.
You are you as a result of a dynamic combination of nature and nurture, a deterministic result.
You are not the person next to you because the person next to you has a different set of deterministic results than you do. When you die, you will not be anyone, past, future or present.
Before you were born, you were not a person (or if you prefer, pick your own cut off point during your mothers pregnancy).
Because everybody else was already taken.
I don't believe I am identical with my brain but I experience a united location as the centre of experiences.
I am always at the centre of experiences and they are located around me. There is a continuation of myself as I travel say from the UK to Australia as the experiences and landscapes change..
It could just be the same location as my brain but still the question is how does my particular self awareness at this location in time and space arise? Why didn't other brains or bodies become my location?
In a related issue I believe perception is solipsistic and we only know and perceive through ourself there is no objective access tor reality.
There is also a causal of issue of what caused "me".
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No, it isn't. It's a classic silly philosophical question.
Quoting bert1
No, it is a grammatical muddle. Whoever you are, you could still ask "why am I me?".
Quoting Bitter Crank Exactly.Quoting Purple Pond Yes.
Quoting gloaming That line of thinking will lead us further down the garden path. Quoting Andrew4Handel I am here.
"A thing is identical with itself."-There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which is yet
connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted".
Quoting StreetlightX
...can be read as a definition of identical. Not entirely useless. "I am who I am" might offer a certain reinforcement to one's identity.
Quoting StreetlightX and were surprised!!
Agree, but then, it's not functioning as a proposition, a bearer of truth.
The feeling of bewilderment in the OP derives from a poorly phrased question. The corresponding statement, "I am who I am", might be seen as a definition, or a reinforcement, of one's identity; and hence be of some use in cases of a crisis...
'bert1 is bert1' tells me nothing about the world.
'I am bert1,' prima facie, tells me something about the world.
What's going on here Banno and Street?
Apparently not, since I did my best in pointing out that if you were not you, you could still be asking why you are who you are.
Can you make sense of this? "In some possible world, Bert is not Bert"?
It might mean: Bert, in the actual world, might in some possible world, not be called Bert.
That's not a problem. It just says you have a different name.
But it can't mean, for example, that the person who is Bert in the actual world might have been Banno in another possible world (taking Bert and Banno as rigid designators).
SO the ball is in your court. What sense is there in supposing that you might not be who you are?
And that is why it is a grammatical muddle. It asks nothing.
What makes a ''person'', if that is what you mean by ''I''?
Per logic one is a specific person based on difference. The genus-difference mode of definition comes to mind.
To achieve an indentity, uniqueness if you will, one has to be different enough from the rest. Otherwise you wouldn't be you but someone else.
Take two cars of the same make. They are identical and so don't have that uniqueness that would give them an identity that could then beget the question ''why am I me and not someone else?''
So, if you want to know yourself look for differences between you and others.
In that enterprise one may realize that differences that make you you and not someone else are very superficial. Every one has two eyes, two ears, one nose, etc. Even thinking-wise one finds an ilk that share your deepest thoughts.
So, it seems, at least to me, that there is no ''I'' unique enough to make sense of the question ''why am I me and not you?''
That said, we may need to consider something else to answer your question with any degree of meaningfulness.
What that is is beyond me.
...because the question is senseless.
Where is that?
There are obviously many different conscious subjective locations but I ended up in this precise one out of all the alternative consciousnesses "being "created".
So what makes someone suddenly become aware of being one precise person?
Conscious has the effect of making you somehow occupy just one persons body arbitrarily.
The causal chain of the body is explicable from DNA copied and passing on systematically through space and time with some alternations but consciousness is something new not passed on like that and it is the only part of the entity that is aware and is even not describable in physicalist terms .
I think deliberate failure to accurately describe consciousness or denial of self and conscious states is simply a position of gross ignorance and delusion. The equivalent of a backward fundamentalist religion creating a perpetual dark ages and state of irrationality.
I think questions like why am I conscious of being a human and not a whale are perfectly valid also. If whales are conscious that is another conscious location that was open to be inhabited.
.
If you were someone else, then you wouldn’t be you. It wouldn’t be meaningful to speak of a “you” who is someone else.
.
Why are you in a life? You’re in a life because of yourself. …because you’re the protagonist in a life-experience possibility-story, one of the infinitely-many such hypothetical stories, each of which consists of a complex system of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things. …hence my statement that you’re the reason why you’re in a life.
.
.
You’ll be another person, similar to the person you are now, but not necessarily in the past, present or future of this physical world. More likely in a different physical world…but most likely in one that is quite similar to this one.
.
.
Probably, yes. Why do I say that? Because it seems to me that no one would get into a societally-bad world like this one in their first life. It would take a few lives to get into this much of a moral/ethical snarl.
.
.
The nature of being a person is to be a particular person. Why are you the one that you are? Everyone’s life-experience story “is there” timelessly, as a hypothetical life-experience story. You’re in this life, in this world, as the person that you are, because those are the conditions of one of those infinitely-many experience-stories. In other words, the person that you are is part of this experience-story, as its protagonist. The person that you are goes with this story. This is the story of the experiences of that person, the person that you are, the protagonist of that story.
.
All the other life-experience stories “are there” too. But of course it goes without saying that this one is about the particular person that is you.
.
Michael Ossipoff
Quoting JohnLocke
The obvious answer is that “you” are a developing process, an enduring structure. Not a thing, but a historically conditioned continuity.
So is a process identical with itself? That requires a whole different metaphysical perspective. The parts can change. What matters is that some essential set of constraints are satisfied. The child becomes the adult and is both the same person and a different person.
The question of identity or individuation sounds silly. But it leads into exactly the kind of deep question metaphysics needs to have good answers for.
Why is me I? What is the I? A philosophical fiction or a convenient designator?
After thinking about it I think the I is both a metaphysical fiction and a convenient way to use language. Problem solved!! :grin:
Is one of the characteristics of existence self-assertion? And, if so, does it explain why I am me? Coz I feel like there's a part of me which constantly declares itself, perhaps as a sum of all the influence I exert, or as the sum of every aspect of awareness which I influence and which influences me (consciously and sub-consciously).
"A popular question. Why am I me? Why am I not the person next to me? When I die, will I be another person in the past or future? Was I another person before I was born? If so, why am I not everyone?"
The answer depends on one's positions on identity and essentialism.
Does a car maintain the same identity over time? Is it the same car if the oil gets changed? New tires? New engine and transmission? What, if anything, is essential to the car's identity?
Similarly, what is essential to a human's identity? DNA doesn't even stay constant over time?
I agree with you. But I don't know where that is.
I don't know where I am in the universe or in a body or a material word.
We are probably on separate sides of this world wherever it is but maybe we are actually on separate planets light years away?
Everyone has a story to tell. But if we make sense of our stories in ways that radically change the way we behave and reach into the "universals of the historical moment" (totally just made that phrase up, email me if you want to know what I think I mean when I say this) then our stories reach out to others in similar circumstances and open up options and ways of beings which hadn't existed before consciousness.
Crucially, that's not what I said! I said that I might not be bert1. This is exactly what is at stake, whether the words 'I' and 'bert1' have the same meaning, or perhaps referent, or not, and under what circumstances. And whether this is a grammatical or metaphysical issue.
Metaphysically, I take the view that consciousness (bear with me with the 'c' word, this is relevant) is not complex. There are not different kinds of it. By contrast, the content of consciousness, namely what we are aware of, admits of limitless complexity and variety. In my metaphysics there is a duality between the observer and the observed; they are not the same thing. The observer is not an object in the world. I know you don't agree with this and I'm not trying to argue for it here. The point is that there is a metaphysical assumption behind my language use, such that the referent of 'I' and 'bert1' can be separated under some circumstances. For the purpose of this thread, a question like 'Why am I bert1?' can be made sense of by separating the referents of 'I' and 'bert1', such that I do not gibber. By 'I' I mean consciousness (in this context) and by 'bert1' I mean a certain set of content to that consciousness.
However, if you take a different metaphysical view, in which there is no separation between observer and observed, and no metaphysical difference between the referent of 'I' (when bert1 is speaking) and 'bert1', then indeed, any such questions such as 'Why am I bert1?' is rendered vacuous, based on a grammatical muddle. And I take it this is your view.
Do you agree, then, that there is a metaphysical element to this issue, not just a grammatical one?
Perhaps you think that the grammatical error causes the metaphysical error?
(I don't want to persuade you you are wrong about the metaphysics, just that you are wrong to say this is a grammatical problem rather than a metaphysical one).
That is not to say that people who ask such questions are never muddled about grammar, they might be I suppose, but I think it far more likely that they simply have different metaphysical assumptions that make sense of their utterances.
Luck; a dice roll; random chance? :chin:
Because nobody else is.
But we don't realise it.
Exactly.
:smile: :smile:
Quoting bert1
I will maintain that the issue is grammatical.
Consider what would happen if you were not Bert1, but were Bert2. Then, you suppose, "Why am I Bert 2, and not Bert1?" would be a genuine metaphysical question. Indeed, for any n, "Why am I Bert(n)?" must for you be a genuine metaphysical question.
However, it just follows from being Bert(n), that you are Bert(n). There is nothing here to explain.
Can we seperate the consciousness of Bert1 from Bert1? I don't understand how. The suggestion is that the Bert1's consciousness is seperate from Bert1's experiences. This involves somehow extracting an essence of Bert1's consciousness from what Bert experiences.
A side line, worth considering, is that consciousness admits of degree, from deep sleep through dreams and wakefulness to being utterly focused...
Indeed, I'm not sure how one could conceive of consciousness apart from being conscious of such-and-such. How to move from consciousness of this or that, to consciousness itself?
Deep meditative states might appear to be an obvious example; but I will maintain that a deep meditative state is not consciousness of nothing, but consciousness of being conscious.
Indeed, we all experience consciousness of nothing - Deep sleep; but this is not being conscious, it is just the opposite - being unconscious.
Well, the observer is not an object in the way of a chair or a tree.
But consider what it might mean to claim that the observer is not in the world...
An observation-less observer?
At any rate, the concept of identity needs to be well defined before any analysis can be done.
Sure, but only with certain assumptions. The assumptions are that 'Bert1' or 'Bert2' is not vague and does not vary in its meaning, nor the entity that it designates, which may be fine assumptions for most purposes. But for many speakers these assumptions are not always made in certain contexts. Consider Barney, who believes in reincarnation. Barney says "Phew, I might have been a snail. I could have been a snail had I not done that good deed in a previous life. I am Barney, rather than Sammy the Snail, because I did the right thing."
Barney might be mistaken or deluded in his metaphysics, but is he literally gibbering? I think not. He is making perfectly good sense on the assumption that his most essential self is his soul and his body is more of a happy accident. You understand what he means don't you?
This is a real problem for reincarnation. The unanswered question is, what is it that was reincarnated as barney, and not as a snail? There is no reasonable answer to this, and so much the worse for the notion of reincarnation. Hence:
Quoting bert1
What does that mean? His soul is his soul? His most essential self is his most essential self?
The notion of an "essential self" remains too vague, too full of wishful thinking. Gibberish - well, if it isn't, explain soul?
Do you think the sentence: "Why is my soul in this body?" has grammatical issues?
Quoting bert1
This is what I said has grammatical issues. If Bert1 is a rigid designator that refers to you, then you cannot be other than Bert1.
Quoting bert1
Depends what you mean by soul.
Let's pretend that what soul means is a particular configuration of neuronal structures as memories and dispositions of a purely physical, structural nature, such that it can be emulated by a computer. Then Bert2 is a recording of Bert1 uploaded to a class III robot with enhanced philosophy circuits, such that when it asks, "why am I me?", we can give a meaningful answer along the lines that Bert1 was a millionaire determined to cheat death, and Bert2 is the result. And of course that also explains why both of them think they are Napoleon.
Because only you can be you and I can only be me.
Entertaining the idea of two of me gives Aristotle a headache. :wink: And before the obvious is pointed out to me, Aristotle would not be alone in his headaching. :joke:
But why?
Is the answer 'because that's how grammar works?' Or is there more to it than that?
Do you see any separation between your own subjectivity, and all the (ever-shifting) things that go up to make ArguingWAristotleTiff?
Which me? The bert1 I refer to when I refer just to my consciousness, or the bert1 I refer to when I refer to the flesh-memory complex you can take a photo of?
If you reject that distinction that's fine, but that just means we have different metaphysics, not different grammars, no?
Hmmmmm… you have me thinking.....
False assumption. What makes you think you ARE?!
Quoting JohnLocke
Quoting Banno
But of course, if you change the question, you change the grammar...
The same question was asked, and the same question can be asked, and a sensible answer proposed under other assumptions. For example @Sam26 might answer something like '...that is the life that you chose in the spirit world, as the most suitable for your education and development'. ( My apologies if I have put words into his mouth he objects to, but it is something of the sort that people do suggest in good faith, and it seems meaningful, if unjustifiable.) My particular previous example was intended to remove all trace of otherworldliness, but there seems no necessity to do so, except to pander to the sceptical.
Not that I'm a Randian, but because A=A. In other words, per logical identity/the identity of indiscernibles and the non-identity of discernibles, things are themselves and not something else.