We cannot have been a being other than who we are now
I notice sometimes that people think in terms of alternate world scenarios in terms of birth. If you were not born, then "you" could have been "someone else". Or perhaps you could have been born in another X circumstance, if not born to the parents or circumstances you were born to. Or you could have been a different kind of being, like an animal. But this alternate life scenario is a false narrative. Rather, there is no "you" that could have become anything else. You can only be the being that you were born as. There is no you prior to your birth that could have been something else. That would have been another person altogether and not "you" anymore.
With this in mind, does anyone have any ideas of what this implies as far as metaphysics and ethics?
With this in mind, does anyone have any ideas of what this implies as far as metaphysics and ethics?
Comments (91)
Consider the two statements: "I love you just the way you are" and "Without each other there ain't nothin', (not even you or me)'". They may sound cliché, but they are true in the metaphysical and ethical sense. Not only as isolated statements; they clearly give meaning to the word "you". If those two sentences were non-sensical "you" would mean the same as the word "that". A tame cat can not fully come to terms with whether a human is a "you" or a "that". Although it struggles with this question several times every day. :-)
It is saying, "I wish my perspective were with a better being in a better situation then I am right now."
I agree with what you have said.
I disagree with @Philosophim, there are in fact profound differences in one's psychology based on how they answer whether they could have been someone else or not. It is not about "wishing" for something, it's about recognising that there's a lot of life, you exist but since seemingly no difference between two consciousnesses at their inception, hence interchangeability.
I don't really wish to talk about what it implies because the question is too large and there's a lot of "maybe" to it, since people don't usually cite it in their reasoning.
For example, let's say a natural disaster strikes another country. Many people are injured/homeless and the country is requesting financial help. You could respond by saying: "Who cares? I don't live there. Not my problem. No thanks, I'll keep my money." Your offended friend might respond by saying: "That's wrong! You could have been born there!"
Technically, no, it was not possible for you have to been born there. The only "you" that exists is the one that (fortunately) avoided the natural disaster. But your friend's point is still valid and logical, even if they used a metaphor. Maybe they didn't even realize that they were speaking metaphorically. Nonetheless, your friend is correct in pointing out that you didn't choose which physical body your consciousness is associated with. And that means you can't take credit for being born into the more fortunate location. Which also means you can't fault the victims for being born into the less-fortunate location. This realization should influence your ethical beliefs. It would make sense to donate to the disaster-struck country, because you would be helping a consciousness that is in the same circumstances as your consciousness; you both had to live where you ended up being born. And you aren't sure exactly why you are you and they are them. So maybe that is you. And if they are you, it would certainly make sense to help yourself out of a tough situation.
Not quite getting "you".
That's fine, but it's still not true that you could be anything else but you. It is just a turn of phrase in the way you describe it, but not an actual point of fact.
Not sure what "you" mean here. Can you be anything else but you? If someone else was born from different parents, that is not you.
You = consciousness and it is an imaginative or theoretical exercise. I think you = consciousness is untrue but that I agreed with you and paraphrased the position I am disagreeing with so idk why ur giving me grief.
Just wasn't sure what you were saying. You agree. Got it. Thanks.
Why privilege birth rather than inception?
Humans have a tendency for counterfactual thinking. It says more about psychology than metaphysics or ethics.
Is that like development of an identity?
The fact is, you are you, and not someone else. That identity is attached to someone born that could not be anyone else. You can choose certain things that develop identity, but what is the thing creating the identity? It's still you, and no other person. Wittgenstein would have a field day with the metaphors people use... becoming a different person, etc. "He's a different person" is a turn of phrase, but not literally a different person.
Yes true.
That was the sweeping statement i was challenging. When exactly does this happen? Why birth and not inception? And what does it say there was the one ovum yet 100m other unlucky sperm? Is the sperm or the ovum the more special one in this story of irreversible biological fate?
In some sense, the person you are is whoever that is after having lived life to that point and suffered some particular mix of life experience. History can’t be changed.
And yet a process of development has been taking place ever since the moment of fertilisation. That leaves vast room for making choices and reacting to accidents. At every moment in life, we could be doing otherwise. We could have been different as a result.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Every person is literally a different set of atoms than they were a few years ago. At a molecular level, the body is continually falling apart and being repaired. So I wouldn’t bank too much on physical continuity.
And in terms of informational continuity, that too is a constant story of dynamical change for our brain circuits.
So to take a strong stance on continuity over malleability doesn’t fit the facts of human development. It is an odd start to an argument.
Once you are conceived, you could not have been conceived as something else, whatever dynamical changes take place or don't from there. You could not have been him or her or that, otherwise you would no longer be you. You can imagine the counterfactual, but you can never actually have been the counterfactual, otherwise, there is no you anymore. There is never a different circumstance in which you were not you.
So in what sense is this fertilised ovum “you” rather than an undeveloped scrap of protoplasm?
Why not instead accept “you” are the process of becoming - the process of development itself - rather than something that wasn’t one moment, and suddenly was the next.
Sperm meets egg and, sure, that is a discrete counterfactual event. But is that what we could mean by “you” as an assignment of an identity. Isn’t it more convincing to consider you as an unfinished project, a story still being written?
This doesn't even make sense. If you can't define 'you' by a consistent collection of matter, nor by a consistent collection of ideas, then how can you go on to make any assertions at all about what is and is not possible of this entity? You've just failed in any attempt to define what the entity is and yet you're proceeding to tells us what physical or logical parameters it must constrain itself to.
Hang on! I’m ‘me’. You are someone else.
Oh damn. I suppose anyone can say that.
You missed the ‘stellar explosion’ bit.
In a way, Kripke's Naming and Necessity might be informative here.
First off, this isnt an anti-abortion argument or anything like that. Inevitably, ideas of conception are contrued as that, so just want that clarified.
It is about counterfactuals in terms of being something. There is something about being born that has limited any counterfactual of being born as something else. I am not denying the role of experience on development and its construction of identity. There was a you, that is not a tiger or another conceived entity. If it that circumstance of entity was not the case (you being born), there might be others then constructing an identity through the course of a life, but never you who are
What is the particularity of personhood you are pointing too? Any counterfactual is a false narrative in one sense. I am wearing a blue shirt, so it is a false narrative that I am wearing a red shirt. But yesterday I wore a red shirt.
I dyed my shirt blue, but if I had dyed it red, I would be wearing a red shirt. Same shirt, different dye -seems to work. So you are presumably saying there is no substance to identity that can be 'the same' in a counter-factual world? But again I see a difficulty. If the alternate is false, then the original is also false, surely? So when I say 'I could have been born female', there is no substance to the I that is in fact male, and none to the I that is counterfactually female either. Why not the same insubstantiality, just as it is the same insubstantial I that is not wearing a red shirt but might have?
I don't necessarily think that argument is inconsistent, it just doesn't say anything compelling. You're contriving thus entity 'you' as something that comes into being at the moment of conception, then you're saying that this thing could not have been any other because it did not exist (even in some proto-identifiable state) prior to that moment.
That's all very internally consistent, but you,ve not tied this entity 'you' to anything which we already agree exists, so there's no compulsion to see what you see.
The point is, that there is no "could have been born a..". That would not be you then. It invalidates that kind of counterfactual line of thinking.
Why is it insubstantial. One case is you born, the counterfactual, would not be you.
That's just a restatement of your position, not an answer to my critique.
If 'you' is a sort of personhood waiting in limbo for a body to become available then your argument is wrong. Your position relies entirely on us not conceiving of 'you' in this way, but you've given no reason at all why we shouldn't, only that you personally don't.
I don't know if there are any implications to it. It's still a useful thought experiment to try to put yourself in someone else's shoes and consider that you're only one consciousness out of many which has been born into a certain set of circumstances and faced with a certain set of experiences which mold the individual. If there are any philosophical implications that you can come up with from your thought than let me know.
Yes it would. If the counterfactual were the factual I would be a woman, and the woman would be me, just as the blue shirt would be red if it had been dyed red, even though as it happens it was dyed blue. Is it an argument you are making or just an intuition being declared? Or a universal aversion to counterfactual conditionals?
Oh, the soul thing. Well, yes it is assuming there is no such prior entity waiting to enter a body. This is an argument based on the assumption that there is no person prior to being physically substantiated. If this is the case, then we cannot entertain notions of possibly being someone else, unless just in imaginative exercises.
There is no counterfactual where you were born something else. That other thing would not be "you". It's not an aversion, just an understanding of what it means to be a being born. You cannot have been born anything other than what you are.
[quote= The Bellman]And what I say three times is true. [/quote]
(The Hunting of the Snark)
You don't have an argument. Not a shred of a reason for your claim. You just repeat it.
So are you making an argument for a soul that can be embodied by anything? There is an essence outside the physical substantiation? If so, then there is more evidence that there is no evidence for that. What we do know is there was you after birth.
No. Absolutely not! I'm not actually making an argument at all. I'm trying to find out what your argument is.
Are ok with my hairdresser saying "You would look better with short hair."?
Are you ok with my sister saying "I wish I had been born a man."?
Are you ok with my hairdresser cutting my hair and my sister transitioning?
Quoting unenlightened Are you saying anything about a person that is not true of a shirt?
You don't have to answer my questions, and if you don't I won't keep on asking any more.
Sure, because there is a "you" there to have shorter hair.
Quoting unenlightened
No, because if born differently, she would not be her, she would be someone else. That is precisely what I mean. You can't be born something else without being someone else.
Quoting unenlightened
That is now a person transitioning and a person with existing with shorter hair.
These were good questions to clarify. I hope you see the difference between the 1,3 and 2.
I did not fully answer your point. I agree 100% that it is impossible to be anything else but you. All I was doing was describing the thought process behind it. We as human beings can imagine impossible things. It is more of a desire and expression of woe or longing in a manner that is entertaining to ourselves. Humans have "mirror neurons" which allow us to envision ourselves in the place of another being. Since we have this, its natural that people would want to also envision themselves as having their cognition and self while being another being.
Philosophy of mind is disappearing into neuroscience, so metaphysics is best answered through there. Ethically and metaphysically with mirror neurons understood, it means we can envision ourselves as other beings, and likely allows us to sympathize and treat other things better. We can imagine ourselves as that being suffering, so we try not to cause it any suffering ourselves.
I would disagree that neuroscience takes over metaphysics, but I agree with your main argument. I am not saying that we cannot use counterfactuals to assess conditions, improvements, etc. once already born. The claim is simply that "you" could not counterfactually have existed as anything but "you".
So this kind of leads into Kripke's Naming and Necessity a bit. You could not be anything but you, but it can possibly be the case that someone else besides X person had done a specific action. It probably would look slightly different, but in the same ballpark. "You" could be no one else, otherwise it is someone else we are talking about.
Sarah could be no one else, otherwise Sarah wouldn't be who she is.
After schopenhauer1 drove antinatalist arguments into Sarah's head she was not herself anymore. The innocent Sarah of my immediate past had changed. She wanted to abort our baby.
No matter how many questions I posed to this new "Sarah", I could not find the counterfactual essence to which I was attached, nor could I convince her to keep our baby.
But I've used the transporter and materialized a copy of Sarah from two weeks prior to sudden change.
Thank science she is back. I've very carefully disposed of the old copy and have purged the transporter records.
Where did the real Sarah go? She shouldn't be other that who she is. I must shield her from the philosophy forum, less she unbecomes herself again.
Every point of your life contains counterfactual “could have beens”. Including all the moments before birth.
And any definition of “you” has to be tied to some process of neurobiological and sociocultural development. Unless you are making some claim about a spirit or soul?
1) I am bert1
(assumption)
2) I could have been unenlightened
(target assumption for reductio)
3) bert1 could have been unenlightened
(Substituting "bert1" for "I" from 1,2. Not sure what this move is called in logic (switcheroo?) but it seems valid to me if 1 is a simple statement of identity)
4) NOT bert1 could have been unenlightened
(assumption based on bert1 and Un necessarily being different objects/processes or whatever)
5) bert1 could have been unenlightened AND NOT bert1 could have been unenlightened
(& intro 3,4)
6) Therefore, NOT I could have been unenlightened
(RAA 1,2,3,4,5)
That'll have to do. I'm sure this forum must have a way to set out arguments like this in a clearer format on the page. Am I supposed to use LATEX or something?
Quoting schopenhauer1
It seems a very odd position to take, and you still provide no argument for your claim that I can understand. My sister can transition to a man, but cannot express the desire always to have been one.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting Nils Loc
This is much more my sense of identity, a sort of virus we infect each other with - old Arthur was infected by Buddhist philosophy and @schopenhauer1 caught pessimism from him and is infecting the forum. Has there been an original thought on the forums, or are we all second and third hand thinkers? I think not only that we could be someone else, but most of the time we are someone else.
Again, your phrasing would suggest that you want to claim there was no you before birth. Yet nothing happened to you at birth except that you moved from one place to another place.
"I am not bert1" by the way, does not (fortunately) entail that I am everyone who is not bert1.
The original post is a little vague. Schopenhauer1, what exactly is your stance on these "metaphysics and ethics" you mentioned? Many ethics are based on the notion that one could be another. Does that mean you disagree with all those ethics? Because the reality of what we are is too far from the abstract thinking of what we could be? Or maybe you disagree with the way people describe the justifications of their ethics? What were you getting at?
Not sure that he's literally referring to the act of birth. I interpreted it to mean the beginning of a human consciousness.
From where I stand, a person is the sum total of his/her thoughts and actions but, as seems to be the case, there is no necessary connection between thoughts and actions and people i.e. anyone can/could've thought/done the things I could've thought/done.
Yes. [quote=Wikipedia]During Gregor Mendel's (genes) lifetime, most biologists held the idea that all characteristics were passed to the next generation through blending inheritance, in which the traits from each parent are averaged. Instances of this phenomenon are now explained by the action of multiple genes with quantitative effects. Charles Darwin tried unsuccessfully to explain inheritance through a theory of pangenesis. It was not until the early 20th century that the importance of Mendel's ideas was realized.
By 1900, research aimed at finding a successful theory of discontinuous inheritance rather than blending inheritance led to independent duplication of his work by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, and the rediscovery of Mendel's writings and laws.[/quote]
The defining element of the person Gregor Mendel (genetics) was duplicated in Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. What do you make of that? :chin:
Does it make sense to say that Hugo de Vries or Carl Correns could've been Gregor Mendel?
Another example of two very different people hitting on the same idea is Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - both discovered Calculus independently of each other at around the same time.
Newton could've been Leibniz and vice versa? :chin:
[quote=Schopenhauer1]We cannot have been a being other than who we are now[/quote]
What defines "who we are now" but the circumstances, physical form, thoughts and actions we are. Have I left anything out? :chin:
However, this definition of identity is problematic for the reason that people speak sentences like "he believes in god" or "he believes in souls". Contained within sentences like these is the assumption/belief that there's something, which "he" refers to, that possesses/has certain beliefs/thoughts whatever they may be. Most importantly these sentences build a wall of separation between beliefs/thoughts and something that has these beliefs/thoughts. Basically, beliefs/thoughts don't determine identity - the real you is the thing with the ability to think/form beliefs and not the thoughts/beliefs themselves.
If this is the case then, it follows that we are distinct from everything else we think defines us - we're not the circumstances we're born into, we're not the acts we commit, we're not the physical form that we possess. Our identity, the you/I, is independent of our thoughts/actions/circumstances/physical form.
Your question presupposes that we're defined by our circumstances, thoughts, actions, physical form and thus begs the question.
And again, I'd like to bring up Kripke..
[quote=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saul-Kripke#ref918554]In the course of making these distinctions, Kripke revived the ancient doctrine of essentialism, according to which objects possess certain properties necessarily—without them the objects would not exist at all. On the basis of this doctrine and revolutionary new ideas about the meaning and reference of proper names and of common nouns denoting “natural kinds” (such as heat, water, and tiger), he argued forcefully that some propositions are necessarily true but knowable only a posteriori—e.g., “Water is H2O” and “Heat is mean molecular kinetic energy”—and that some propositions are contingently true (true in some circumstances but not others) but knowable a priori. These arguments overturned the conventional view, inherited from Immanuel Kant (1720–1804), that identified all a priori propositions as necessary and all a posteriori propositions as contingent. Naming and Necessity also had far-reaching implications regarding the question of whether linguistic meaning and the contents of beliefs and other mental states are partly constituted by social and environmental facts external to the individual. According to Kripke’s causal theory of reference, for example, the referent of a given use of a proper name, such as Aristotle, is transmitted through an indefinitely long series of earlier uses; this series constitutes a causal-historical chain that is traceable, in principle, to an original, or “baptismal,” application. Kripke’s view posed a serious challenge to the prevailing “description” theory, which held that the referent of a name is the individual who is picked out by an associated definite description, such as (in the case of Aristotle) the teacher of Alexander the Great. Finally, Kripke’s work contributed greatly to the decline of ordinary language philosophy and related schools, which held that philosophy is nothing more than the logical analysis of language.[/quote]
The transmission of the moniker, "unenlightened" is finite, and a baptismal ritual called "signing-up" was undergone in which the guidelines were read and formally assented to. But this is a cultural matter.
If you were a woman of the last century, or if you were a Native American, you would expect your name to change as you identity changed.
You want to declare that formally meaningless, and make me say instead:
A woman of the last century, or a Native American would expect their name to change as their identity changed.
And that I can so easily make the same point either way, strongly suggests to me, that your claim is a matter of linguistic grammar and usage merely, and says nothing about identity or personhood.
So the point is that, a proper name is more than a description like "the person who wore X" or "identifies as Y". Rather, in another possible world, that person could have worn A and identified as B. There is something about a person that is the same in all possible worlds. That was about proper names and their referent specifically, but this points to a kind of essentialism about individuals.
[quote=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rigid-designators/#RelBetRigAssTheRef]Kripke calls designators like ‘The successor of 2’ rigid de facto, rather than rigid de jure: the description happens to be satisfied by the same object in every possible world and never anything else. Compare the intuitively distinct case of de jure rigidity in a name, like ‘Barack Obama’. Here the intent is to refer to this person in all possible worlds, whatever descriptions may designate him.[/quote]
It doesn't matter what name is used to rigidly designate the individual, the causal baptism rigidly designates in all possible worldsno matter the name. You cannot not be you, in other words in all possible worlds. If you were not you, then there isn't even a "you" to be something else. "You" are more than the sum of a bunch of descriptions that could change in any possible world.
Would you admit that my mother might have aborted me? Or that the midwife might have bungled my birth so that i was born with cerebral palsy or some other brain damage? Or that some developmental problem might have made me gay, or intersex? These seem like possible events to me, in the sense that they can happen to people. Even in this world I can be a baby and an old man, and they are very different, so while I concede that "...If you were not you, then there isn't even a "you" to be something else." I can be something else and still be me, in all kinds of ways, and that includes loss of memory, body parts, brain function and most of the things one identifies as one's self.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well your point is your point. And if you only want to make your point and not address my points at any point, there is not much point in my continuing to point out anything, and so at this point I think I'll stop making any further points, to be blunt.
I took schop to be talking about people with all their non-name-dependent features rather than switchable name-bearers.
:) Indeed. It depends where one puts the brackets I guess. "I am (not-bert1)" means you are everything that isn't bert1. "I am not (bert1)" means just that you are not the one thing that is bert1, but you might or might not be one or more other things.
(Not that I agree with Schop's OP just for the record. I think there are two senses of 'you' in play that are not distinguished. I don't think statements like 'I am bert1' and 'you are unenlightened' are always straightforward statements of identity. I assumed they were in my rendition of Schop's argument to be charitable).
EDIT: removed double-negative
Yes, then, you would be no more.
Quoting unenlightened
So then what is the you that is the same in all possible worlds? That is the you I am talking about.
Above and beyond this, even if not using all possible worlds logic, there is something unique about the causality and relations you have had as a physical being, with an ego, interacting with the environment that cannot be simply the same as another being.
You're the one talking about it, you tell me. I don't think there is such a thing. I think an old man has inherited a name from a baby. "Robert *****" is not the name of the DNA, or the name of anything constant in this world, let alone across all possible worlds.
[quote=Bob Dylan]I'm just average, common too
I'm just like him, the same as you
I'm everybody's brother and son
I ain't different from anyone
It ain't no use a-talking to me
It's just the same as talking to you.[/quote]
Yet there is something that is the same in all possible worlds. Perhaps it is something like the DNA.
I also want to add, that the implication is that there is no being born "as something else". You could only have been born as you.
As sure as eggs is eggs.
You are trapping yourself into paradox by a logic which insists that identity is about a definable essence or atomic set of facts. Identity is understood in a positive sense as an irreducible "something".
But that is a good argument for instead understanding the issue of identity from a process or probabilistic point of view. That is, identity is defined in an open-ended fashion as a constraint on difference rather than a constitution of similarity.
If you pin your categorisation of "Schop" on a notion of absolute similarity - some unchanging essence - then there is no way to handle exceptions to the rule. Differences will always matter. And so you wind up with the usual paradoxes of thought.
But if instead you take a constraints based approach - a family resemblance, fuzzy set, Bayesian, or a 100 other such implementations of a probabilistic ontology - then the assumption is that there are always differences. Similarity doesn't truly exist. However constraint does exist to distinguish between the differences that make a difference vs the differences that don't make a difference.
Identity then becomes a thread of being defined by a general persistence rather than a specific existence. "Schop" becomes a historically-constrained process that gathers specificity by memory and habit. The identity becomes sharp as the Schop process becomes more and more discriminating about the differences that make a difference to it, versus the differences that don't make a difference to it.
In an "all possible worlds" setting, Schop cuts his nails this morning in one, and Schop cut his nails tomorrow in another. That's a difference. But it doesn't make any particular difference.
And then will be an infinity of worlds in which Schop is cutting his nails at 10.08am precisely this morning, yet every act of clipping is fractionally dissimilar. Differences can't be eliminated as nothing can ever be exactly similar in this life. (Quantum mechanics tells us this is true on the microscale. LaPlacean determinism is ruled out by quantum indeterminism.) Yet also we can see that these infinite fractional differences concerning the historically-constrained identity of "10.08am nail clipping Schop" are differences that really fail to make an essential difference.
So that leaves the question of the differences that do make a difference to Schop as an ongoing process - a developing story of increasingly specified constraint on possibility. A sense of identity is what grows by an accumulation of experiences. Or in other words, an accumulation of habits of discrimination.
Schop starts as a mindless blob - a fertilised ovum. Schop is born - some world of events begins to interact with some set of genetically-coded constraints. Schop becomes a boy and then a man - a history accumulates, habits are formed, memories are made - that increasingly reduce the space of "could have beens" which might count as differences that would have made a difference.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So you are trapping yourself into a false binary here. Even at the moment of birth, there are all the differences that wouldn't have made a difference as well as all the differences that would have.
The definition of "you" - that assertion of identity - has to be a logically fault-tolerant to apply to the real world. Otherwise you have a logic that only generates paradox.
Identity boils down similarity defined as a limit on difference. Something is essentially the same if it fails to be meaningfully different. That is why exceptions can prove the rule - they demonstrate that there is a constraint in play which is the bit that is unmoved by the accidental.
But the constraints are nothing mystical. They simply are the fact of a developmental history, a process of habit and memory accumulation. They are the information - the capacity for making discriminations - encoded in your genes, your neurons, your habits of thought.
Identity is usually taken in logic to mean absolute similarity. But in reality, identity is only constituted by a relative absence of significant difference. In nature, there is always difference. But also, by the same token, indifference.
It is like they say about the river. You never step into the same river twice. Yet it is also always the same river ... for all practical purposes. Every H2O molecule is a different one today from the ones yesterday. No ripple of turbulence is a mirror of the day before. But the differences don't matter a damn. They blur away into the enduring generality that is the probabilistic or macro view of that river.
Have you considered Schopenhauer's position here? He was one of those who realized (correctly, in my opinion) that there is only one universal self or experiencer, and that it occupies all perspectives. "Occupies" is a bad choice of word though really, since it isn't that there is something separate from the world that is somehow inserted into it to experience it. Rather, this one universal experiencer is the very world itself.
The way you are thinking about this matter suggests that there are a number of separate and discrete selves in the world. There are not. If you analyze it, any notion of true individual selves, whether soul-based as in Christian metaphysics, or materialist, falls apart. It just doesn't work.
I'd have to dig in Schop's writings to find a passage that expresses the sort of view I am attributing to him, and I'm feeling lazy at the moment. I don't remember where to look exactly. Maybe later.
Much of what I'll say here isn't from Schopenhauer.
It isn't that you could not have been someone else. Instead, you, the real you, the very base-level experiencer, the universal self, actually are all people and all things at all times. It is not that John is Joe. No, that would be silly. That suggests that inside Joe is a little John. Rather, the universal self is John and is also Joe. You are both them at the same time, but separately in a sense.
When we think that what we fundamentally are, what our true identity is, is this particular body and personality, we make a mistake. If that's what you think you are, then of course that could not have been anyone else. But that's not what you, the one experiencing this, really are. You are all of it and also beyond all of it, "it" being the stuff in the world.
This isn't solipsism. In solipsism, it is as if one individual human perspective is the only real one and everything that is an object for that mind is merely that, with no other people actually having their own subjectivity. No, this view I am talking about involves there being subjectivity everywhere, but with all this subjectivity actually being one, there really being only one subject, one that is everywhere. But it isn't that it is spread over space. At the level of the subject, location simply doesn't make any sense.
Location only shows up as a feature of the contents of experience. It is part of how experience is structured. It doesn't apply to the experiencer itself.
The reason we fail to see that we are experiencing everything is that information isn't integrated in such a way that we can know that we are seeing through the eyes of both John and Joe at the same time. Joe's brain contains no memories of being John. And John's brain contains no memories of being Joe. It is a little like an amnesiac who can move between several rooms, but who only has a chalkboard in each room to record and remember experiences he has in that room only. He lacks a way of moving information from one room to another to integrate it all and realize that he occupies multiple rooms. While in room A, he has no memories of ever having been in room B.
Information works according to the laws of physics and is local. There are differences and distinctions. One "person", one body in the world, is distinguished from another. Basically what makes it up is a collection of such distinctions. It is all the ways in which it is different. Information, in Bateson's words, is "a difference that makes a difference". Matter is information. Form is information. What is experienced is information. But the experiencer is not information. The experiencer is never an object. Information and the laws that govern it belong to the contents of experience. The subject itself has no differences and is not a content of experience. A rock can be "this, but not that" or "here, not there", but such distinctions do not apply to the ground-level "I".
I suppose that it might make sense to say that when we think, "I am (insert your name)," we are not wholly incorrect. It is the exclusivity of that identification that is mistaken.
When you ask why "we" experience different things, this still sounds like it assumes multiple experiencers. Experiencer A experiences X and experiencer B experiences Y. There are not multiple experiencers. Rather, the one experiencer experiences both X and Y. Let's say that X is the experience of being "me" and Y is the experience of being "you". The one experiencer experiences both X and Y at the same time.
But why don't we know that we are both? That's what seems to beg for explanation. If you are also me, why don't you know it? The answer lies in information integration, or a lack thereof, as I noted earlier. It is a matter of what information is accessible at a given location. In your brain, the one experiencer simply has no access to the memories in another brain. The memories in this other brain are instead over here, and are accessed by the one experiencer here in this brain, not there in that one. The one experiencer has access to those memories only at that location. It doesn't have access to both sets of memories in one brain. In order for that to happen, your brain would somehow have to contain the memories of two brains.
What I am getting at might start to make more sense when we bring time into this. Consider that you intuitively think that the one experiencing being you now is the same one that experienced being you five seconds ago. Why does this seem to be the case? It is because you remember. Your current brain state contains information about those past brain states. But your earlier brain state did not similarly contain information about this current one. In it, there was no sense of being the current you in the same way you now feel that you were once it. There is a sense in which you know your identity with your past body-self while not feeling the same way about your future body-self. You have no memories of your future brain states. Causation does not work that way. So there is a temporal asymmetry.
When you reach out in your mind for knowledge of your past self, memories come. When you reach out for knowledge of your future self, you come up empty. Similarly, when you reach out for knowledge about what it is like to be me, you come up empty, and for a similar reason. In both these empty-handed cases, you lack the knowledge because information does not flow that way. Despite this lack of information, that which experiences being you now is identical with that which experiences being you a minute from now. And similarly, despite the lack of information in your brain about my brain state, that which experiences your brain state is identical with that which experiences mine.
That which has the experiences is one. The seeming rift between the two experiences is a result of the fact that nowhere is the information in both brains being integrated in a significant way. There is no experience that takes the form of such an integration.
Consider the amnesiac I mentioned earlier. Let's call him Bob. He can't remember anything from one minute to the next. We place him in a room and have him make notes on a chalkboard in that room about what he experiences. We show him things. He makes notes. We then ask him questions. He consults the board and tells us what he has seen. This chalkboard is his memory. But suppose we move him to a different room with another chalkboard, let's call it room B, the first room being room A. In room B, we show him different things and he makes different notes. But if we ask him about things he experienced in room A, he comes up empty-handed. In room B, he simply lacks access to information about experiences in room B. But the critical point of this scenario is that Bob's inability to integrate information between the two rooms is not evidence of two distinct experiencers. The experiences in both rooms are had by the same guy. But neither of the rooms contains information about what was experienced in the other.
Our two brains are analogous to these two rooms. The difference is that the subject experiencing both of them isn't moving from one to the other. It experiences them both perhaps simultaneously. It just lacks a way of fully integrating the two. These two brains would have to be tied together as part of a bigger brain or some such in order for that kind of integration to happen.
There might be somewhere in the world or in time where the experience of being your brain and the experience of being mine get integrated and there is knowledge and memory of both at the same time in basically the same place. Consider Bob again. We have rooms A and B with their limitations. But suppose that room A and room B both contain cameras fixed on their chalkboards and this video from both rooms is then fed to a screen in a third room, C. If we take Bob to room C, from this vantage point, he "remembers" everything he saw in both room A and room B! But if we take him back to room B, he knows nothing of room A or room C. So from A, he knows only A. From B, he knows only B. From C, he knows A and B. He can report experiences had in A from either A or C, but not from room B.
It could be that in the future, through some advanced technology, our brains will be linked together, and an experience might then be had of my memories being integrated with yours and of the seeming difference between our identities dissolving. What would that feel like? I don't know! It surely wouldn't feel like there are two distinct subjects uncomfortably occupying the same double-brain. Maybe there would be a sense of realizing that there had never been two separate subjects in the first place.
There is some level of integration happening between our brains though right now just because of communication and other forms of physical causation where we impact one another. So, in this brain, I have access to a little information about your brain state. But the bandwidth is very low!
It is hard to imagine that one subject could be experiencing multiple perspectives at once without "knowing" it until you really digest this idea of information integration or lack thereof.
Returning to your question:
Quoting khaled
"We" don't. In reality, there is no "we", if by that we mean a plurality of subjects. And there is really just one big experience that includes the lives of everyone and everything. That experience has a certain structure, this structure reflecting the laws of physics and information and logic. The form of this experience is such that some parts of it simply don't refer to some other parts, and that's all the seeming gulf between us really amounts to.
The truly hard thing to explain is something hard to explain no matter what stance you take metaphysically, and that is why there are differences in the world at all, why there are many things, why there is form at all, why there is "something" instead of nothing, why there is broken symmetry, why there is information. It is the great problem of the one and the many. I don't know quite how to approach it. But I sometimes suspect that if things are seen sub specie aeternitatis, or under the aspect of eternity, there is perhaps no broken symmetry at all. At the level of the whole, seen from no particular perspective, perhaps there is NOT something rather than nothing. Maybe it is really nothing. Maybe taken all together at the same time, every pair of opposites cancels and there is no form whatsoever. The whole of everything, after all, is not related to anything else. Form implies relation and relations belong only to parts. Maybe it only seems like there is something "from the inside" so to speak, when the whole is seen from a partial perspective. Maybe the world is almost a kind of delusion, a case of cosmic dissociative identity disorder.
*shrugs*
Without going to great lengths, I don't know how to convince you that there is just one universal subject. I arrived at that position after thinking fairly intensely for a long time about a lot of issues. It solved a whole bunch of problems in one fell swoop. It is the only answer that really works, as far as I can tell. When it dawned on me, many things suddenly fit together and clicked. I don't have much doubt about it any longer. Some questions and puzzles remain, but this position minimizes them. To try to communicate the way it all sits in my mind though would be a daunting task. It would almost require me to put you through a similar history of thinking. I would have to get you to feel the weight of a bunch of other philosophical problems and then show how this idea solves them all neatly.
I get frustrated because no matter how I present the position in a forum post, it just sounds weird or silly, probably because it is such a counter-intuitive idea. I despair of the fact that to really get it across in a remotely convincing way would probably take a book.
Yes, you often misconstrue my antinatalist arguments, but this is a good representation of what I mean.
Quoting Pinprick
Yes, there could not have been a you with a different set of circumstances. You would not be you.
So my main point is that this development of blurry identity is only going to happen once. There is no you except you. You could not have been another being. Your interaction and genes are yours. That combination would could not have been something else. Unlike contingencies of different outcomes in a life, that life itself could not have been contingently different, without not being you anymore.
It is true Schopenhauer was an idealist of sorts. That is to say, he thought that Will which is the ground of existence, takes on form in a sort of "illusion" of the individual mind which projects space, time, and causality, which creates a sort of fake "representation". The mind is simply Will trying to strive to find some sort of resolution, that it doesn't get in the existence of the illusory representation. That's not necessarily my position, but I do find Schop's idea of Will as a striving principle in human motivations useful.
But still, when are you most truly you? At birth? At death? Somewhere in between even?
If every decision you make along the journey counts towards the final sum, then quite a different conclusion results from this fact of every step involving some counterfactual contingency.
Whether we believe our life has a purpose, or if it is essentially meaningless, doesn’t change the fact that we will develop a selfhood constituted of some collection of ingrained habits. The you-ness of you will be an accumulation of facts that you always had some kind of say in. And whether your choices were generally defeatist or generally entrepreneurial, doesn’t change the fact that “you” is what you are more towards the end than towards the beginning.
Commonsense would then agree with biology that perhaps the most “you” period is during your active maturity. The infant you is too unformed, too much a collection of open possibilities. The senescent you is too fixed, too stereotyped by habit, and so has lost something that was essentially you - a capacity for continuing personal growth.
The goldilocks years are maturity when there is a good balance of wise habits and fruitful learning still occurring. A mix of the determined and the contingent which meets the criteria for being “lively and mindful” from a biologist’s point of view.
Are you sure about this? Many children are born highly developed - Mozart, Picasso, child geniuses etc.
And this means?
My arguments are not about how to identify identity. Rather, it is a sort of claim of causality. There could never be a situation where "you" were born otherwise as some other being. As stated in my last post. Yes, once born, I recognize and believe in the idea of contingency. One could do this, but did that instead, or this circumstance instead of that circumstance lead to different outcome which affects identity.
It lends credibility to the idea that our spirits exist before we are born. It is clear that many children have highly developed characters at a very early age. This cannot easily be explained by physical science.
I can get behind everyone having an identical Bob but not everyone sharing a single Bob
That is an implication you picked up on.
It takes decades to develop character and some children are already born with highly developed characters - bad and good...
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/character
Mozart was a child genius. https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/pictures/composer/classical-musics-child-prodigies/mozart-child/
If we bring in social constructivism you can be born into a caste system within India and so be judged as a preexisting archetype. While in the US some think people should pay reparations for their ancestors owning slaves even though those were not individual choices.
My point here is that it's difficult to judge identity this way since social upheavals may bring greater degrees of freedom regardless of biological age.
Which comes to my next point:
Quoting apokrisis
It may seem so (through a glass darkly), but I sometimes wonder that developmental psychology is lifelong especially in the cyber age. Once someone can disguise certain characteristics they can become different people and develop new qualities. Though they may have always had that quality and it was simply dormant. And there is also the "grandmother hypothesis" which is a new role which nature is said to provide.
I don't know much about gerontology but it certainly deserves more PoM analysis. Especially in regard to Alzheimer's disease which I'm not sure has been dealt with properly.
Though there is always the intuition that "things are getting worse" as you age. Looking back that feeling it is likely due to reduced freedoms since most times, I just want a reset button like a video game.
You’re right about the grandmother hypothesis. My use of “senescent” is more technical here as it is a term that can be applied to biological systems in general - even ecosystems. And humans are different precisely because their developmental life cycle has been stretched right out so that they can be socially constructed as much as genetically preformed.
Homo erectus looks to have had no teenage stage, for instance. And it is very different that humans survive long past menopause - as if passing on social knowledge might be helpful.
The OP wants to fix the moment of birth as “everything” to make an antinatalist point. But the facts speak different.
Or at least we might say we had no choice to be born, and yet also, birth is itself the birth of a lifetime of choices that actually construct this “you”.
I would say you are taking your argument in a poor direction, the claim that someone can be born as someone else is made by an adult, the onus is on them to describe exactly how that might work. We do not need to identify when "you" becomes "you", all we need to do is say that "you" are a biological entity and that without being born, you wouldn't exist. That is a simple truth, all of this "soul" nonsense just makes things complicated.
Also the definition of character that you sent:
“Qualities that make someone distinct from others”
Doesn’t take long to develop at all you already have qualities that make you distinct from birth.
I don’t think child geniuses are amazing to the point of requiring the existence of spirits that reincarnate with some of their “character” intact
But can it be explained in terms of genetics and nurture? It hasn't been so the question of preexistence of our spirits is still open.
Quoting khaled
I have known children who have almost adult characters from an early age. Some children have a level of maturity that normally takes decades to arrive at.
Maybe later. Addressing this matter in a satisfactory way would require some time and effort, and I am a little overwhelmed and unmotivated at the moment. Really, it probably should be handled in another thread. If I find the time and muster the will to try to lay out the arguments, I'll post a new thread and bring your attention to it.
In the meantime, if you are interested, the position I am basically advocating is called open individualism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism
There are a number of things to read here on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenIndividualism/wiki/reading
But you might not like the consequence. It's the proper name, as a rigid designator, that picks out the very same thing in each mooted possible world. So schopenhauer1 may have developed forma different ovum, had different parents, been born a year later, and so on; what remains constant is the designation, not the genetics.
Prove to me he meant for a rigid designator to point to a completely open or empty set.
That's your argument it seems.
Yes, I understand that. I'm just putting forward an observation that needs to be answered.
However, the all possible worlds argument obtains in an abstract thought experiment way if we were to designate (rigidly) what it is that obtains in all possible worlds. So I still think it's useful.