May 02, 2011
Subjective Consciousness: A Unique Perspective
by Quinn O'Neill
As an atheist, I sometimes get asked if I’m afraid of what'll happen when I die. Naturally, I'm not afraid of going to Hell or any other supernatural place and I'm not afraid of being dead, but admittedly, there is something that scares me. I'm afraid that I could someday exist in (or as) another body.
My position is not so much that we can exist in more than one body but that we don’t know that we can’t, or even how probable it would be. To be clear, I'm not suggesting any kind of dualism or that we might be reincarnated with our current attributes and personality traits. Consistent with a naturalistic view of the world, I accept that consciousness and perception of self are generated by the brain, so when the brain dies there's nothing left - no thoughts, no personality, and no spirit. The chance of an identical physical copy of my brain arising again is very small, so perhaps I needn't worry.
But it’s here that the worry creeps in. Is an identical physical copy of my brain what it would take for me to experience being alive again? In order to establish that subjective consciousness is restricted to a single body, we'd have to understand how it works and we really don't.
From a naturalistic perspective, the brain is what makes us who we are. Presumably, if we could create perfect physical copies of ourselves right down to the wiring of our brains and the neural connections that store our memories, we could effectively recreate ourselves. But there’s a problem, because even if I could perfectly replicate myself and make a thousand copies, I would perceive only one of these as “self”. In other words, whatever makes me uniquely me is not something that I could even in theory share with an identical physical copy. The only thing that could distinguish me from such copies is position. Only the location of my perspective would be unique.
This is a bit of a conundrum. To an objective observer encountering me and one of my copies, there’d be two identical copies of me, each thinking itself the original. From my point of view, however, there’d be a big difference between the copies - I’d be one of them and the other would be someone else.
The question to answer in deciding whether I could exist in another body may be what makes a perspective mine. This would seem to be largely independent of physical composition if an identical physical copy could have an entirely different perspective. What then would determine which copy I would perceive as self? Would there be an equal probability of my perspective being located in any copy or might I exist in some kind of superposition, like Schrödinger’s cat?
We can resolve this issue by acknowledging that the copies couldn’t be perfectly identical, since they would invariably be dissimilar below a molecular level. However, if the uniqueness of a subjective consciousness is attributable to such minute differences in composition, a unique subjective consciousness would be transient since matter is in a state of flux. Not only would it be unlikely that I’d ever exist in another body, it’d be unlikely that I’d exist in my current body in, say, five minutes - that person will be someone else, defined by a slightly different composition. We don’t have any empirical way to confirm that our present subjective consciousness spans a bodily lifetime. We only know that we are conscious now.
Steve Grand puts things in perspective nicely in his book, Creation: Life and How to Make It. He says: "[Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place . . . Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. "
From a naturalistic point of view, however, you are the stuff of which you are made and you weren’t present for your childhood. Memory creates the perception of continuity, but it may be an illusion; a unique consciousness generated by a very precise material composition couldn’t be persistent.
Many people will readily assert that we each get one life and that when you die, that’s it. But we don’t really have any reliable way to gauge the likelihood that a particular subjective consciousness is persistent or that it’s a one-time-only event. Investigating subjective experience scientifically is difficult since subjective phenomena generally don’t lend themselves to empirical investigation.
This difficulty is well recognized by scientists. John Maynard Smith, who was a widely respected evolutionary biologist, in an interview with Robert Wright, offered this comment: “I’m quite clear in my mind that I do not understand consciousness, that I have nothing sensible or intelligent to say about it, that I don’t even have any good ideas for experiments or investigations that would shed light on it. What I don’t know is whether it’s possible to have intelligent ideas about how we might investigate it.”
As individuals we can’t know for sure that other organisms, even other people, experience subjective consciousness as we do. Much of human behaviour could be explained without it. The withdrawal of a limb from a painful stimulus, for example, could be purely reflexive without any subjective experience of pain. Richard Dawkins nicely expressed the difficulty in knowing whether other people and animals are conscious in a 2009 interview for Big Think. Asked if there is a certain brain capacity necessary for the development of consciousness, he responded “nobody knows, because we don't know which animals are conscious. We don't actually, technically, even know that any other human being is conscious. We just each of us know that we ourselves are conscious. We infer on pretty good grounds that other people are conscious, and it's the same sort of grounds that lead us to infer that probably chimpanzees are conscious and probably dogs are conscious. But when we come to something like earthworms and snails, it's anybody's guess.”
Evolutionary biologists aren’t necessarily the best positioned to elucidate the basis of subjective consciousness and scientists in other fields have contributed to this effort. It’s worth noting that there are a number of hypotheses that incorporate quantum mechanical phenomena. These might be particularly relevant to the hypothetical scenario with identical physical copies, since such copies would differ mainly at atomic and subatomic levels at which quantum rules come into greater play.
While quantum hypotheses may reflect progress in our understanding they remain controversial. For the moment, at least, subjective consciousness doesn’t seem to be well enough understood to rule out the possibility of recurrence. Not knowing exactly what material entities or neurophysiological processes give rise to a unique subjective consciousness, we can’t affirm that it won’t arise again at some point in the future.
I find this possibility of recurrence frightening. Being somewhat cognizant of recent events around the world and the conditions in which some people live, I realize how lucky I am to have been born in a stable, developed country to parents who could feed me and send me to school. If my subjective consciousness were to arise again someday, I probably wouldn’t be so lucky.
While I don’t believe in a supernatural Hell, human suffering can certainly reach hellish proportions on Earth. If the threat of going to Hell after death is enough to inspire moral behavior, the possibility that one’s subjective consciousness might someday recur should be a powerful impetus for improving circumstances for people on earth. We might even want to rethink our treatment of animals - at least until we can be sure that we won’t someday see the world through the eyes of a circus elephant or a beef cow.
Photo credit: nickandmel2006 at flickr; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Posted by Quinn O'Neill at 12:08 AM | Permalink
Comments
Don't worry about it, since, by your logic, your future cow self would have no recollection of your current human self, so 'you' would never know either way.
Posted by: aguy109 | May 2, 2011 9:14:15 AM
This sounds like something from Philip K Dick. And now I come to think about it, your musings might be more engaging and memorable if they were embedded in narrative. You already have the premise of a story.
Posted by: Mike Cope | May 2, 2011 9:52:17 AM
You're quite right, aguy109, but when my future cow self is branded, it'll still be 'me' that feels the pain. By your logic, if someone were going to torture you next week but assured you that you'd have no recollection of your past during the procedure, you wouldn't worry about it(?) The lack of knowledge of past identity probably wouldn't affect your suffering much, so assurances that you'd have no recollection of who you were really shouldn't assuage your fears.
Posted by: Quinn O'Neill | May 2, 2011 1:17:34 PM
I think a lot of this could be clarified by settling on what the uses of "I" and "me" and "we" refer to in this post. Once this is clear, then we could say whether that kind of thing could switch bodies (and species). It would also help to keep in mind the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity. Whatever the author means by "me", she can only be one of them. So she isn't numerically identical to the copies she considers, though they may be qualitatively identical. And note that it is false to say of these copies that "the only thing that could distinguish me from such copies is position." The author and her copies would also have different causal histories, which would lead to another important distinguishing mark: she would have genuine memories of having experienced a past while her copies would not. The copies' beliefs about things they did in the past would be false.
Posted by: MRM | May 2, 2011 3:42:16 PM
A few clarifications (@MRM):
I’m not really suggesting that anything could “switch bodies”, but that whatever material entity, physical structure(s), or neurophysiological processes give rise to a particular subjective consciousness might arise again either by chance or by artificial means.
You’re right that there would be immaterial differences between me and my hypothetical copies, but these wouldn't distinguish me in any material way. If it weren’t known, there’d be no way to determine which was the original.
The distinction between numerical and qualitative identity nicely parallels the problem of trying to identify a material basis for subjective consciousness. There wouldn’t be any material difference between two people who were qualitatively identical but numerically different, so it would seem that whatever makes each subjective consciousness unique is immaterial in nature. Of course, two people can’t be qualitatively identical; but, if we distinguish them on the basis of their material differences at atomic and subatomic levels, then numerical identity also becomes an impossibility since the same person wouldn't be qualitatively identical at different points in time.
Posted by: Quinn O'Neill | May 2, 2011 7:50:08 PM
"I’m not really suggesting that anything could “switch bodies”, but that whatever material entity, physical structure(s), or neurophysiological processes give rise to a particular subjective consciousness might arise again either by chance or by artificial means."
I mentioned body switching as a shorthand for the topic of the post. Since both the opening and closing paragraphs do in fact consider this phenomenon it struck me as a reasonable interpretation of what it is about. And it struck me that the reason why the possibility of duplicating the physical substrate of a "particular subjective consciousness" was of concern was because doing this would recreate the person associated with this consciousness in the duplicate body. Note that this physical duplicate would not reproduce the _particular_ subjective consciousness subsumed by the original physical structure, etc. And if the claim here is that a person just is a particular subjective consciousness, then creating a physical duplicate won't recreate the person. It will recreate a person who is qualitatively identical.
"You’re right that there would be immaterial differences between me and my hypothetical copies..."
In the context of this discussion "immaterial" can mean irrelevant (it's everyday meaning) or it can mean non-physical (the particular meaning it has within the confines of the nature of mind and persons). I never claimed that there would be immaterial differences between the original and the copies in either sense. First, I said that there would be significant (not irrelevant) differences between the original and the copies, differences that would be traceable to the different causal histories of the original and the copies. Second, accepting these differences does not require countenancing the existence of anything non-physical. It may be true that "there’d be no way to determine which was the original," but this doesn't mean that original would go out of existence by virtue of creating the duplicates.
"There wouldn’t be any material difference between two people who were qualitatively identical but numerically different..."
Again, "material" is ambiguous here. There certainly would be a material difference in the sense of difference in physical matter. The two would be made out of different stuff. Do you mean there wouldn't be any _significant_ differences between the two (assuming that difference in constituent matter isn't itself such a difference)? In the case of creating a physical duplicate, it strikes me that the fact that one of these (the original) would have genuine memories and true beliefs about its past while the other would have fake memories and false beliefs about its past is an important difference.
"so it would seem that whatever makes each subjective consciousness unique is immaterial in nature"
Why isn't the difference just a matter of the body that the subjective consciousness is housed in? Why isn't causal history another source of uniqueness?
"numerical identity also becomes an impossibility since the same person wouldn't be qualitatively identical at different points in time."
It's unclear what this means. This is intended as a conclusion that follows from the observation that molar level objects are not constituted by a stable collection of molecular level particles. This observation is meant, I think, to support a kind of eliminativism about objects that exist through time. It is necessarily true that an object is identical to itself, so claiming that such elminativism makes it the case that "numerical identity also becomes an impossibility" is false. Rather the eliminativism makes it the case that objects only exist for a moment in time - but at that moment the object is identical to itself. But the more relevant point here is that we need an argument to go from the observation about constituent particles to the conclusion that people made out of such particles only exist so long as a particular collection of the particles exist, i.e. that an embodied person cannot survive the loss of constituent particles. I can see how such an entity may not survive the complete loss and replacement of constituent particles all at once, but this is not the case under consideration. A nation consists of people, some of whom die and others who newly join by birth. If everyone died at once, then concluding that the nation went out of existence seems reasonable. But the nation survives the regular loss and acquisition of members through death and birth.
Posted by: MRM | May 3, 2011 12:12:56 PM
I'm late on this, but I'll throw it out there anyway.
Since any living being is not static, but rather highly dynamic, an exact replication of any living being would only be an exact replication during the exact moment of creation. From that instant forward, they two would diverge like a forked river, each following their own path, developing their own consciousness, and not being the same.
Think of identical twins. They're exactly the same in that magical moment when "the `ole egg splits in the womb" as Jim Ignatowski once put it on the show Taxi. But thenceforth, they begin their inexorable journeys and will never again be exactly the same or share a consciousness.
Posted by: Akim Reinhardt | May 6, 2011 10:52:25 PM
I agree, Akim, if two identical people could be created, they would immediately have distinct perspectives and their paths would diverge. The question is, if you were one of these two, which perspective would be yours and what would determine this. Since there’d be a physically identical person who is not you, we might wonder why you’d exist at all - why not two people who aren’t you. To what can we attribute your subjective consciousness (your awareness of being alive and your knowledge of what it’s like to be you in the present)?
Posted by: Quinn O'Neill | May 7, 2011 10:36:00 AM
MRM,
You say, “I never claimed that there would be immaterial differences between the original and the copies in either sense.”
Differences between physically identical copies would necessarily be immaterial in the sense of being non-physical in nature. They would also be irrelevant in the attempt to identify the material (ie., physical) underpinnings of subjective consciousness. I think both connotations of “immaterial” work here, but I intended the former.
“Why isn't the difference just a matter of the body that the subjective consciousness is housed in?”
It could be. Position alone could distinguish a unique subjective consciousness; but then we’d need to know what determines your position in order to know if you could exist again someday. If we think of a subjective consciousness as a persistent phenomenon, we could refer to trajectory in space and time instead of position. But the problem remains - what would determine your position at the start of your trajectory?
“the eliminativism makes it the case that objects only exist for a moment in time - but at that moment the object is identical to itself.”
Agreed. Wikipedia offers the example of Clark Kent and Superman as being numerically identical. If we require sameness down to a sub-molecular level, we could still say that Clark is numerically identical to Clark at a single point in time, but I’m not sure how useful this is. The point is that if a unique subjective consciousness is generated by such a precise material composition, then it can exist only for a moment, and on this I think we agree. The conclusion from this is that more than one unique subjective consciousness may exist in a body of changing physical composition and structure.
Posted by: Quinn O'Neill | May 7, 2011 2:16:27 PM
The argument in a nutshell is this:
From a materialist perspective, subjective consciousness is a biological phenomenon that arises from material constituents. In order to know whether your subjective consciousness could arise again in another body, we’d need to know exactly how it arises in your current body and we don't. The assertion that “you only live once”, though widely accepted and possibly true, is baseless.
Posted by: Quinn O'Neill | May 7, 2011 2:36:27 PM
For all you know, Quinn, your putative other "self" could be the person sitting next to you, since there is no logical reason to suppose that one "self" would hav to die before arising elsewhere. Indeed, everybody, including you, me, the neighbors' cat and the three-headed aliens on planet Melmak, might be sharing the same self.
However, until someone finds a way of testing the matter, it remains an issue for the Navel Academy.
I think my own pet Navel Contemplation project is more interesting: "Is Shakespeare Dead?" i.e. when an audience watches a Shakespeare performance, are some of the Bards thought processes still active in other brains, in spite of the fact the playwrite died about 400 years ago.
Posted by: aguy109 | May 8, 2011 3:37:08 AM
@aguy109,
Subjective consciousness is sometimes described as "what it feels like to be you". While there may not be important objective differences in conscious experience from one person to the next, we only know what it is like to be one person at a time.
The Shakespeare question is interesting. I suppose he'd consider his performances today and their effects on audience members to be a "living record of [his] memory."
Posted by: Quinn O'Neill | May 8, 2011 8:06:34 PM
This comment is a bit belated, unfortunately, thanks to a week intervening between your post and it which involved a philosophy conference on anarchy (at NY's The New School), multiple Indian music concerts, a seminar on the philosophy of early modern life sciences, a sick family member, and my underdeveloped coping skills…
Anyway, I make no claims as to the profundity of my analysis here, but I hope it points out some areas, which I didn't see examined in the comments thus far, for better minds than mine to explore.
Central to the issues you raise is the idea, with which I agree, that there is an essential, irreducible difference between the first person perspective and the third person perspective on consciousness, between my experience of my consciousness, and your experience of my consciousness - however that word may be defined. (My own ever-evolving sense of what "consciousness" is tends to be increasingly informed by neuroscientists - e.g., Damasio, Ramachandran - and those philosophers who seem most attentive to the implications of neuroscience - e.g., Churchland, Dennett - rather than the more armchair-ish philosophers of mind - e.g., Nagel, McGinn. Mysterianism strikes me as essentially defeatist. It's early yet.)
Another point framing this subject is that the way we think about consciousness in particular and the mind in general (i.e., as including all cognitive processes whether conscious or not - consciousness as the tip of the cognitive iceberg) is shaped by our lexical habits in discussing it. For instance, we commonly use a noun - "mind" - which has the positive attribute of being compact and widely used. As Wittgenstein pointed out, meaning is shared use, and to get any traction in communication with others we have to start with the most widely shared, general usages and work from there to mutually clarify more specific senses.
However, using the noun "mind" to describe a process, an *activity* of a thing that *is* properly referenced by a noun - the brain - is to commit a *category mistake*. (Gilbert Ryle's term: he coined it to point out the linguistic confusion at the heart of Cartesian (and, I'd say, Platonic) mind-body or spirit-matter dualism - the idea that there are two (natural) kinds within one category, the category of "stuff", if you will: physical "stuff" and non-physical "stuff". As Wittgenstein also pointed out, many apparent problems in philosophy turn out not to be problems at all but confusions of language, poorly composed propositions. One does not solve them; one dissolves them.)
Perhaps it would be better to use "thinking" - a verb, or at least a gerund - or "cognition" instead. (Of course, "consciousness" also is a noun.)
But that can be rather clunky in practice, and thus I continue to use "mind" while silently noting to myself that I don't really mean that thinking is a *thing* and thus made of of some nebulous kind of "stuff", and pointing out the noun's ill fit to reality whenever that move is less likely to descend, or at least be perceived to descend, into pedantry.
I do this in the knowledge, gained from my readings of cognitive linguist George Lakoff's work, that almost all thought, and thus language as well, is metaphoric in nature. (It's not just language - but thought itself; Dr. Lakoff very kindly clarified that to me in an email a few years back when I asked him about an earlier writer, Owen Barfield, who thought metaphor was just a matter of language practice.) Our communicative life, the world of language and concepts, is lived amid a complex and not easily altered superstructure of metaphor and simile, and our casual but incorrect usage of "mind" is but one of many aspects of that context. We reify many concepts we shouldn't, and I hesitate to belabour this particular reification too much, and risk putting more emphasis on lexical precision than on the larger matters under discussion.
So with that caveat "in mind" (note the pervasiveness of the metaphoric superstructure we build up or recapitulate when we use the handy shorthand word "mind" - here, as Lakoff might note, we use a "mind as container" metaphor), I'd say that within the naturalistic perspective on mind there is a split between those who don't grant any meaningful, qualitative distinction between first-person and third-person perspectives (Skinnerian behaviourists are the most cartoonish, extreme example of this, hence the joke about when they meet: "Hi, you're fine, how am I?"), and those who insist that, despite the rightness of a purely naturalistic approach to matters of the mind, we *must* grant that there is a difference.
It seems to me that this distinction derives initially from our sense, perhaps also metaphoric, that spatial *location* matters: the idea that "I" am "in" myself/my body/my brain, in contrast to *your* location, in yours. (Even the use of the term "perspective" implies location. The Skinnerian who avers that there is only one "real" perspective, the third-person one, is implicitly granting the relevance of relative location in general, which raises the question of how one can privilege location relative to another's brain over location relative to own's own, with the former as "real" and the latter not.)
As materialists or naturalists or however we wish to label ourselves, I think we can collapse the internal (and also metaphorical) distancing engaged in when saying "I am in my body" by simply noting that "I *am* a body - this body" (and all processes arising from it), and not even "I am in my body", which implies a separate "me" that can claim ownership over "my body" as if "my body" were some initially empty vessel like a car, into which one enters and then exercises control. (That's the homuncular fallacy. No; I do not *have* a body; I *am* a body.) If one simply says "I am this", then the pertinence of location cannot be disputed. One's cognition is in this metaphoric sense essentially and inescapably spatial (or spatio-temporal, if one considers oneself as a four-dimensional "world-tube", to use physicist Hermann Minkowski's term, in spacetime); it has bounds contiguous with oneself. Indeed, it can't be otherwise, since it supervenes upon one's spatio-temporal existence. (You'll note that in using "it" as a reference to cognition I'm still reifying, um, it. Dang. There's no escape!)
All this likely serves only to clarify further a stance, the naturalistic one, which we both share, of course. But where I wish to engage one of your worries about duplicate copies of oneself is to note that in every moment oneself is engaged in interaction with one's environment, and this interaction constantly alters oneself, depending on *where* one is and thus what one encounters. This location is also characterized by continuity through time: one does not suddenly pop out of one location and into another. (Star Trek transporters notwithstanding: even there one's constituent parts, dispersed and converted into bits and back into atoms again at the end of the transporter stream, still have a continuity through the process.) One's world-tube is a single, integral thing throughout its existence, since time and space are aspects of a common dimensionality of existence.
A duplicate cannot occupy the same space as oneself, and thus its interaction will differ from one's own. (This isn't even considering its possibly differing decisions as to where to direct its attentions and thoughts. That gets into matters of free will and determinism which I don't think we need to address here. We can consider the determinism of environmental factors deriving from location as sufficient for causing difference. Nor do we really even need to bring up quantum indeterminacy, as you did, to posit unavoidable differences, though that certainly adds to the case.)
SInce this is the case, there cannot even be said to be any exact duplicate of oneself except at the exact moment (now, there's a slippery concept to define!) one is duplicated. My duplicate might think it was me, but I am still, temporally speaking, the original, my existence preceding the moment of duplication, where my duplicate's did not. This originality is independent of whether I die first and by some technical wizardry my entire living physical being, and every one of my supervening processes, including my "mind", is recreated as it was before I died. The copy in that case would still be a copy, discontinuous in time (and since space and time are inseparably joined, discontinuous in space as well) from the original me. Its location would have no continuity with mine and thus it would have no claim to be me.
(One can object, well, let's leave the temporal element out of it, but if one does that one has also to leave out the spatial, since there is no such thing as separate time; so, again, that doesn't work.)
From the moment a duplicate exists, forward, it must differ from me; it must be discontinuous from me; and thus its experience cannot be my experience. Its spatio-temporal separation alone is sufficient to compel its difference.
Of course, this does not address the dilemma you outline: how could any duplicate of me NOT think it was me, assuming (safely, I think) it carried forth the same set of memories up to the moment of duplication? From the first person perspective, thanks to those memories, it could not help but think, regardless of how logically one laid out the case that it cannot be me, that it most definitely IS me.
Have you seen the movie Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, which came out a few years ago? Various identical clones of him are sequentially awakened by a resident AI on the moonbase where he's apparently the sole occupant, as previous ones die in accidents. (IIRC, each remembers up to the point of the previous one's accident, which, since the clones were already in existence, in stasis, possibly diverges from our materialist constraints on the portability of mind, since it implies some sort of transfer of memories from one brain to another, but never mind… In any case, they share memories up to some point.) Eventually one doesn't die, since his clone goes out and rescues the one who was supposed to have been left to die in a rover, and thus: two hims regarding each other. (They don't waste any time on the metaphysics of who's who; they focus on the task of getting the hell out of there, back to Earth, out of the clutches of the Evil Corporation which sent them there as expendable miners.)
From the third person perspective, tracing the spatio-temporal continuity or lack thereof, we can determine who is technically the real me, but, phenomenologically, that carries no weight for the consciousness of the duplicate. And yet we cannot dismiss the relevance of location and thus of the equal validity of both consciousnesses, *to themselves*. We cannot say that only one or the other is the real "me" consciousness in that sense, or that only first- or third-person perspective is real (the source of much silly p-zombie [philosophical zombie] speculation in philosophical papers); we are probably only able to say that, yes, it's quite possible that "I" exist in both places, for different but equally valid reasons. (The original has spatio-temporal continuity as its claim, while the dupe, like the original, has the memories. Are memories sufficient to establish "me-ness"? They may be, and certainly seem to be from the first-person, phenomenological viewpoint. And since memories have a physical substrate, perhaps they're sufficient from a third-person one as well. Or they may be necessary but not sufficient.) Perhaps this qualifies as the superpositional state you mention. (They don't call it the Hard Problem of Consciousness for nothing…)
I don't have much to say about the possibility (implicitly pan-psychic?) of suddenly going from being a consciousness of *this* body to being a consciousness of *that* body, which is to say, going from being one body to being another. As one of your 3QD commenters said or implied, how would you know that it had happened? Memories cannot be transferred from one brain to another, as far as we know (and think we know fairly well at this point given the state of neurological knowledge), even within one species, let alone among any and all creatures possessing some degree of consciousness. (Along the latter lines there is a Ray Bradbury story about a mathematician who suddenly finds himself a cow in the slaughterhouse; seeing that he's about to be killed, and suddenly not having the power of speech, he tries to scrawl math formulas in the dirt with his hooves to establish his intelligence. No dice. One butcher in the abattoir says to another, "Some of them do this strange little dance when they're about to be killed.")
And yet, ever since early childhood a question which may not have an answer, which may just be a kind of Zen koan, has occurred to me from time to time: Why am I me and not somebody else? (In earlier years, I would have formulated that as: Why am I looking out from this body rather than from another? But that formulation collapses with the exposure of the homuncular misconception of consciousness, as I outlined above. And, derivative of my more precise formulation, is there some sort of connection between all individual identities - yes, identities, rather than the consciousnesses which supervene upon some of them - beyond the banal "We're all recycled starstuff"?) I think this may be at the heart of your inquiry, and indeed at the heart of the deepest questions of consciousness and of existence. Or not. But just to say "or not" as one's *first and only* response would be to abdicate the kind of curiosity that has usually served us well in philosophical and scientific inquiry. There may not be an answer (it may just be a case of Wittgenstein's confusion of language), but we sure as hell ought to ask, and to keep reformulating the question.
Posted by: Kai Matthews | May 11, 2011 8:28:12 PM
Jeez - this stuff is good, both posts and comments. Quick note, Quinn - when you say you are OK with all consciousness emanates from "my brain", well you are using two loaded terms there (1) 'my' - never mind - this one is too tough to put down in a pithy sentence but its a Self/Other argument (2) 'brain' - operates on the assumption that physical stuff is bounded in a 3D space, but that too ain't necessarily so. So it follows that consciousness ain't necessarily wrapped in brain.
Posted by: David Schreier | May 14, 2011 10:07:07 AM
The assumption of science that all is caused by matter is as much without basis as the assumption of religion that all is caused by the mind. How can mind and matter even exist without each other, if they manifest through each other? We assume that consciousness has a cause, but not matter and mind? Where did they come from? Isn't it just begging the question?
There is actually a third possibility, and it is that consciousness is a self-contained system of information with its own internal causality. In that case, anything is indeed possible after death.
Posted by: Niels Vandamme | Sep 12, 2012 1:46:48 PM
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