Well the question did specify “the sentient bit”. So indeed, while I may still to “me” to you while I am, say, under anesthesia (just as you’d identify any other object as the same thing), I am not me to me because there is no functioning sentient bit to be observing itself. To the POV of my self there is no discontinuity: I instead have a perceived continuity of experience updating a new ever changing definition of self to myself.
Let us make this thought experiment*: you enter into a machine that twins you into two exact copies both derived of current you, both with all of your current memories and thoughts. Those two "you"s go off and have different experiences and meet back a decade later. One has been to war and lost a leg and has PTSD. The other is married with children and a successful newspaper editor although has gotten a bit paunchy with middle class life.
Both of those "you"s would justly claim same-selfness with the past you before the machine (even though each being very different than that you) and neither would look at its twin in exactly the same way. Each twin would be nonself to the other.
InterestedObserver, you argue for the soul as the sentient bit. The soul would be the unchanging essence of self that stays the same even as the body varies. Of course there are the usual materialist objections, but I’d like to ask you how the soul as the seat of the self would deal with my thought experiment. Which twin would possess the soul? Or did my imagined machine make two new souls?
When does the soul inhabit a body? If biological twinning occurs after that which zygote gets the soul and which gets a new one? Or are there two of the same soul floating about? How about in conjoined twins? What parts need to be separate to get two separate souls? Is it the same or different than the parts needed to declare them as having separate senses of self?
Descartes error is an interesting book on the subject. He discusses how certain brain injuries have profound effects on concepts of personal identity. He comes to the conclusion that our reasoning is profoundly tied to our bodies; Not just our brain but our whole bodies. See Mr. Dibble’s post above. I’m really not doing justice to it here.
I think our idea of personal continuity comes from memory. If even the most profoundly brain damaged person has some sense of continuity, they’ll think of themselves as one thing existing through time. We project our own sense of continuity on other people, like the brain-dead and even corpses.
Another view is that it’s a judgement call. There may be no bright line when you cease to be you. (Well, other than death.) If an organization, a sports team for instance, loses a player, they’re still the same team. But if they completely disband, move to a new city and reform with new players and a new name under new mangagement, can they be the same team? What if they keep a couple of players or coaches?
There’s two layers to identity–“I” and “me.” “I” can be thought of the thinker, the seat of consciousness. “I” is really a function of conciousness. “Me” is the rest of, well, me, and is the part of my body and brain that “I” is conscious of, including consciousness itself. So you can say that “me” is everything “I” is conscious of. If you removed a single hair from my head without my noticing, “I” would not change one bit.
Sort of. We still called my dead uncle Randy “Uncle Randy”, but no one thought he was still there.
How about amnesiacs. If you lose all your memory is that being reborn? Are you suddenly a different person or are are you nobody?
Should you send an amnesiac to jail for a crime committed just before his memory was gone?
When i read the topic, i thought this was intended to ask “which part of your personality of you is the real you” which i think is a question worth hijacking.
Like say there’s a working mom who’s all business from 9-5, a doting stepford wife when with her kids, a raging alcoholic when at cocktail parties, and a football junkie on sundays… which part of her is the REAL her? Is she a mix of all parts, or sectored off based on the circumstances, or are some parts more dominant? What dictates the partitioning of certain behaviors? Why are some people more likely to be parceled off while others embrace one philosophy to apply to all aspects of their lives? Is this "well-rounded"ness a good thing? a bad thing?
I believe your grandmother knew what she was talking about. Many people experience being out of their body and seeing it separate from themselves. The body is only a shell, to hold us, our consciousness which is us. That is what I believe is true.
Could it be she was only doing what others expected of her, acting the parts she believed to be appropriate. While in reality she was none of those things, a person no one really knew.
This is like the classic illustration of fuzzy logic:
I have an apple. We all agree it’s an apple. Now I take a tiny slice off of it. Is it still an apple? Sure. Now I take another tiny slice. It’s still an apple.
If I keep doing this, at some point the apple will cease to be an apple. But there is no one slice you can point to and say, “there! you just sliced off its appleness!”
The transition from apple to non-apple is fuzzy. The human brain doesn’t handle fuzziness very well - we want black and white, yes and no answers. But the world often doesn’t work that way.
This is the crux of the never-ending abortion debate. Unless you’re a fundamentalist who believes that the moment an egg is fertilized a human is created, with all the rights a human should get, then becoming a human is fuzzy. Most of us who aren’t fundamentalists would agree that a fertilized egg isn’t a ‘human’. Most of us would also agree that a newborn baby IS a human. So at what point on the transition from egg to baby did ‘humanness’ become the defining characteristic? It’s impossible to say. The transition is fuzzy. Hence we are destined to argue the question forever.
I agree - that and our tendency to hastily assign properties that we simply invented - like ‘appleness’ in your example. An apple doesn’t care how apple-y it is or is not. In truth, it has no property of ‘appleness’, beyond our perception of it.
Our spirit is the most enduring part of each of us and it remains after the physical body dies. It contains the core of all that we are in whatever kind of existence we find ourselves.
You’d have to define ‘you’ to answer whether you’d still be you if you lost all your memories. You’d have a somewhat different personality because your experiences help to shape you, but essentially, I don’t think people change all that much, so I’m going with you’d still be you. JMHO. - Jesse.
Since there’s no evidence whatsoever for a ‘spirit’, I think we can discount that for the purpose of this conversation.
A more interesting question is whether or not what makes you ‘you’ is the sum total of your memories, or whether there’s more to it. I’d say there’s quite a bit more to it, because the neural pathways we develop are shaped by our experiences, and that controls things like the kind of music that we find intrinsically appealing, how we react to certain stimuli, what triggers our emotions at a low level, and so on. So if all your memories were erased, you might still be scared of spiders (if you are now), and still might like rock music (if you do now), but you wouldn’t know why, or how you came to feel that way.
The reason I ask is because the majority of atheists I’ve talked to feel there is more to them than ‘This crude matter’ as Yoda would say. Some call it their soul, some call it their spirit, and most atheists don’t believe it continues after death, but few I’ve talked with don’t believe they have one.
Just curious - Jesse.
P.S. As for how the personality is formed and what makes you you, from a strictly medical standpoint - we don’t know. We can theorize all we like and most of us do, but ultimately, we simply do not know. That’s a fact.
That’s generally rhetorical laziness on their part, in that they are borrowing a common term that represents something they don’t believe in, and using it in a different sense. When those people talk about a soul, they’re generally talking about something within their minds that makes them unique and represents their core. Other people sometimes call this the mind, as a distinct part of the brain.
By the same token, both atheists and theists often talk about what’s in their hearts. They mean something that is central and important to them, but they don’t share the ancient Egyptian belief that the heart is the center of consciousness. It’s a linguistic convention.
From cases like Phineas Gage we do know that an individual’s personality can change dramatically because of brain injury. At what point a person changes into some other person is less clear, but that’s a philosophical distinction more than a physical or neurological one and it doesn’t necessitate ghosts flying out of our noses when we sneeze. The phrase “tits on a bull” comes to mind.
A finger is part of a living being, but it isn’t alive and can’t die. You wouldn’t say your fingers are alive now since they don’t have any life of their own, so i don’t agree you can say it’s dead if it gets cut off.
No there isn’t. We’ve covered this in many threads, you don’t need to derail this one. Things that cannot be explained by medical science right now are not evidence. Unverified and/or obviously prejudiced personal experiences are not evidence.
Yes. I won’t categorically state that there’s no God, because I don’t have any evidence one way or the other. But I find the question uninteresting, just as I find the question of whether or not tiny gnomes are responsible for stealing my socks when one goes missing in the dryer. If the question can’t be quantified, if there can be no physical evidence one way or the other, it’s really a waste of time to talk about, other than as a philosophical exercise. I would put the question of God on about the same plane as I would a question about whether or not we live in a giant simulation, or whether we’re all brains in a vat. Fun to talk about, but meaningless as a way to seriously understand the universe and our place in it.
That doesn’t jibe with my experience. Most athiests I know feel the way I do - that we’re just biological machines. Evolution has given us brains that have become so complex that we’re capable of self-awareness, but after the brain is dead, we’re simply gone.
Now, there are some interesting questions to be asked about what it means to be dead - if a giant supercomputer in the future randomly created simulated brains, and it hit on the exact pattern of neural connections that make up my brain today, would I ‘wake up’ in that future? I have no idea. I don’t know that that is qualitatively different than ‘waking up’ every morning after I go to sleep. So it’s possible that there will be something else for me to experience after the death of my body and brain, but that’s just raw speculation. I can’t think of any physical principles it violates, so I have to consider it possible.
But I don’t believe I was created by God, or that there’s some ‘spirit’ living within me that will persist after I die. What constitutes ME is nothing more than a very complicated series of electrical connections and biological switches.
This is true, but as Marley23 pointed out, we are collecting evidence that our behaviors, impulses, emotions, and other factors that make us unique do reside in various areas of the brain, as we’ve seen personalities radically change after brain trauma.
Medical science is not the holy grail of evidence, you know. But actually it was medical science that did the research that showed consciousness continues to live after clinical death.
