Philosophy questions

Great Debates
1

I hope this is the right place for this…

So, I’ve been thinking about a few questions, lately, and as the people on these boards seem to spend an awful lot of time thinking, I figured I’d put some of them here in the hopes that I could get some opinions and, possibly, some ideas on books to read on the subject.

So, what is it that makes a person who or what they are? I’ve heard that one’s job doesn’t define who s/he is, nor do a number of other traits or aspects of their existence, so what is it that does?

That said, what is it that makes someone a human being/man/woman? Is it reasoning capacity, biology, the choices one makes, the ability to create or end life, some sort of spiritual endowment, or something else?

I’d be happy to provide my own ideas on such, should anyone be interested, as well.
Thankee!
bamf

2

Most fundamentally, the unique string of memories encoded into the incredibly complex piece of meat in your skull. We are our memories. If all of my memories were swapped with someone else, I would think I was that person.

The ‘human’ part is covered by genetics, although a cyst or a hair is genetically ‘human’. The ‘being’ is a little more difficult. I would suggest that a ‘being’ has sentience, ie. it has the capacity to pass certain criteria for self-awareness, such as the ability to recognise oneself in a mirror.

3

You know I’ve never really, really fully understood what is meant by that ‘self-awareness’ thingy.
What is it exactly?
Why would ‘lower’ animals not have it ? and why would the mirror be a good test?
I mean, my cat is able to see its reflection. It knows it’s not another cat, yet it doesn’t sit down to look if its fur is neatly in order. It just completely ignores its image. Is it not self aware?

4

Would you still be the same person if a disease, injury, or just plain old age erased 20% of your memories? Would you only be 80% “you”?

Another way to think of it is to compare it to inanimate objects. If you had a boat, and had to replace 10% of the material that made up the boat because of defects or damage, you would still say that the boat was the same boat as before. If every year you had to replace a different 10% of the material, at the end of 10 years, when a full 100% of the material that makes the boat have been replaced and literally not a single screw is part of the original boat, even then you would be likely to say that it was not a different boat.

Same as us. I am not a different person simply because 90% of my memory bank has been changed since i was a child. I’m a changed person, certainly, but I recognize the earlier, completely different version of me in first grade also as myself. If you go back far enough in time that I literally can’t remember anything, and have no reason under your definition to recognize myself, I would still consider the “pre memory” child to be my own unique identity, even though that memory bank completely, 100% differs from my own current one.

Also, compare your definition against the idea that it is theoretically possible to create a person with memories literally exactly like yours, since there is nothing inherently sacred or unique about how your brain stores information. The only problem is complexity. If a brain with the same exact memories as you were created, and then put into someone else’s body, would that person be you? I would answer no. If that same brain were exchanged with your own identical current brain, however, I would consider saying “yes”.

5

My cat thinks there is another cat every time she sees her reflection. She hisses and stands up on her toes, ready to fight it.

It creeps her the hell out that the mystery cat moves exactly as she does.

The fact that your cat completely ignores the image is not proof that it is aware that the cat in the mirror is actually itself.

6

Well, it is easy to argue ‘exent’ in such a difficult field of study.

Perhaps it would be more useful to express the question differently: “Is there anything which cannot be explained by reference to meat, memory, sensory input and so on?”

The ‘mirror test’ is merely one, arbitrary way of defining a ‘being’. I wholeheartedly agree that what ‘I’ have might well be simply a more complex version of what a cat, insect, computer or even flower or cyst has.

No, I would be a different person. I wake up a different person from the one who went to sleep. The only “me” is a string of memories. “I” die every night, and a person who thinks they’re me because they have the same memories wakes up. If you somehow copied my memories into a vat-grown clone such that there was no way to tell the difference between us, there would be two of “me” at that instant, and then when the memories instantly began to diverge there would be none of “me”.

7

I think you must have read my site. I would love to hear your opinions on what makes us uniquely us.

Anything that is changeable, such as: name, job, thoughts, memory, position, thinking ability, and a multitude of other similar constructs are not us. The reason being is that after these things change we are still us. Therefore anything that changes is not us. We are us even if we can’t think as well, remember as well, do math as well as we used to.

It is a grand question, let me here your thoughts.

Love

8

Your memory can change, even get lost as in amnesia, but you are still you. Nope not memory.

Love

9

No, sorry, don’t quite agree.
Given a sufficiently hard whack over the head, resulting in brain damage (or a sudden but profound wearyness of friendly grinning Dutchmen), you will no longer be you.

Sure, there will be a you but you will no longer be the same you. Experience changes the kind of person you are.
IOW you are still the being ‘you’ it was at birth but that being has had multiple changes in its pesonality since.
Or are you saying you haven’'t changed since your NDE?

10

What we are discussing is self-awareness, knowledge is something different.
You may wake up feeling different, more knowledgeable due to what you learned the day before, etc. But your self-awareness would be the same.

It is pretty easy to show you are not just memory. For instance, where do all your emotions come from? As far as I know memory does not create emotions. They are deeper than that.

Love

11

Well, no. Actually, I haven’t. I’ll check it out in a few, tho’.

My thoughts on this topic are still a bit embryonic. That said, I tend towards believing that there is something intrinsic and indestructible about a human being. I mean, I’m not sure if it’s what some people consider a soul or not, but the idea of there being a core to someone’s identity and personality is one that appeals to me. I’ve heard the arguement that one is defined by their memories, and memories are fragile things which can be affected, if not outright destroyed, by such things as drugs and physical trauma. This seems to suggest that one’s personality is capable of being changed with some ease, although specfic outcomes seem to be more difficult to get (forgetting a specific memory, for instance, is not quite as easy as it was in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

I’ve heard of a few cases that one can’t help but consider, in these circumstances. Phineas Gage, for instance, and his dramatic personality shift after that railroad spike went through his brain. I tend to think that this might be a change in personality expression, myself. I mean, someone who’s lost an arm isn’t capable of the same things he used to be. Perhaps someone who’s lost brain mass is along the same lines. That doesn’t mean that they’re a different person, just that they have a different way of interacting with the world.

I guess, in the end, I’m more for the idea of the human body being an avatar and point of expression for consciousness, as oppossed to its defining quality. Some tools are more suited to certain tasks. Some peoples’ bodies and minds are more suited to some tasks.

That said, I occasionally think that humanity and perhaps life itself might be the expression of a single meta-being that is attempting to experience everything at once, that we’re all facets of something else entirely. That’s a different topic, I think.

That said, I think one’s identity is a result of one’s choices, actions, form, mindset, attitudes, and so on. It’s an emergent property of the way one interacts with the world, and is subject to change. One’s self, however, is something that does not, in my opinion. It’s something that seems to me to be timeless.

Granted, I could be wrong. I often am. But that’s why I started this thread. It’d be nice to talk about it and exchange ideas and whatnot, especially since I’m just now starting to examine the ideas I do have.

Why do you end your posts with this? Not that I’m criticizing, I’m just wondering :slight_smile:

bamf

12

The meaning of self, like the meaning of absolutely everything, lies in relationships, in interactions. Meaning is more of a verb than a noun.

It’s a slightly trickier notion than it may seem at first glance. Clue: it isn’t the same as asserting that meaning is subjective instead of objective; it isn’t the same as asserting that people are blank slates and that meaning comes entirely from context, socialization, location in history and culture, etc. Instead, the individual has existence, and characteristics, and brings them to the interaction with context, history, socializing forces, and there, in the interaction, meaning is woven.

13

I don’t know how you arrived at your definition, but it matches almost exactly what near death experiencers learn.

The Creator is All-There-Is, we are a part of the Creator, indestructible, eternal, formed in the likeness of the Creator. As part of the whole we have access to the whole through inward meditation. We are spirit living in a physical world. Essentially our job is to learn, explore, challenge, and gain knowledge of ourselves which is passed on to the Whole. Can be called Oneness, has many, many names, sometimes called God.

Now, about that Love.

There are three characteristics of the Whole: curiosity, love, and self-awareness.

Love is the energy force that holds it all together, and curiosity the driver behind the Whole. We are made from love, our goal is to learn more about love and how to use love (the force) for our benefit as well as others.

Ultimately, what we have here is love creating and recreating itself over and over again. There are no limits to our curiosity or love so nothing is impossible. Self-awareness brings us the tool of control which is thought.

Actually I have done as best a job of explaining it as I can. This knowledge is passed in a split second of our time when NDEers are touching the hem of the spirit world. Well actually a whole lot more is passed, but little is remembered.

I write this for you, as I know from past experience, my post will be trashed by the skeptics. But perhaps you can see the similarities.

The “self-awareness” is spiritual and those who seek to know “who they are” will find their spiritual selves.

Love

14

Disregarding completely general thisness and focusing on people…

Mostly, I think identity is a matter of conscious activity, a combination between self-image, reinforcing experience, memory. I do not think identity requires continuity of form or thought (i.e., I can be “me” again after sleeping or being comatose, etc). I do think identity follows the arrow of time backwards, but not forwards.

This last one is the result of some thought experiments around teleportation and duplication devices. If I made a duplicate of myself, is it me or just another person that identifies as me? In this sense, both of us may have a single being as a part of our previous identity (the original) but neither is identified as the other (how would we select between them?), so each has its own identity. So we may look back to lay claim to a part of our identity, but we may not start from the past and move forward necessarily. So nothing forbids two people with identity to lay claim to an identical prior entity, but nothing from the past may lay claim to any posterior entity.

Which, I think, makes sense given that memory is a component of identity.

Now, as for the rest of the OP

Firstly, it is not a mere coincidence that we use the same word in many contexts, but it would be a mistake to suggest that the word must mean the same thing in all contexts. So, absent a context, I do not think there is a "man"ness, "woman"ness, "dog"ness, or any such quality in an abstract, transcendent sense (reference: Platonic forms, certain kinds of transcendental idealism (non-Kantian, non-phenomenological)). However, I would suggest that the context contains, analytically, the meaning of a word to the extent that if I understand a context, and I understand how a word is used in other contexts, it is, in principle, possible for me to understand what the word is supposed to mean in this context (by analogy, similarity, contrasts, etc). For example, a metaphysical idealist believes all of reality is mind-correlative, which contrasts realism, which believes there is a mind-independent reality. However, another use of “idealist” is someone who is often unconcerned with practical matters, where a “realist” (contrasted again) is someone who is concerned with practical matters and various levels of pragmatism. Two contexts, same symbol. Again: it is no accident that we use the same words here, but it would be a huge mistake to suggest they mean the same thing!

So descriptors, to be meaningful, must have a context accounted for. Within a context, a descriptor will sometimes provide a means for its own evaluation (“an idealist believes all reality is mind-correlative; this person does not believe all reality is mind-correlative; this person is not an idealist”). Other times this won’t be the case (what distinguishes a “guiding light” from any other light to a lost traveller?).

This latter question treads on the grounds of the philosophical problem of universals. Depending on who you ask, there are traditionally two answers to “Do universals exist?”

  1. Yes, they do (realist, not to be confused with either of the two “realist” positions described above (isn’t philosophy fun?))
  2. No, they don’t exist at all, it only seems like they do (nominalist).

Those who choose the first path are further divided by answering the question “How do they exist?” and those who choose the second path are further divided by answering the question “Why does it seem like they do?”. Some consider the matter closed with conceptualism but I wouldn’t say there’s universal (cough) accord on the matter.

A big post, lots of words, but reading up on some of the terms might get some people acquainted with various positions.

15

I didn’t want to repost all that material. I did understand it, but not how it pertains to knowing “who you are.” I have always had an aversion to “what if” speculations such as duplicating yourself.

This is not a question about self-awareness or consciousness, it is about “knowing who you are.” I am aware of myself, but do I really know “who I am”. I am not like anyone anywhere, I am me. No matter what happens to me, losing or gaining memory, knowledge, beliefs, whatever, I am still me, but that doesn’t tell me “who I am.”

“Who you are” is a question related to the emotions, just as memory, beliefs, and thoughts are related to emotions. It can be “felt” but not explained.

When this thread started I thought it could be a great avenue to wisdom, but I am having second thoughts. I am not sure how many notice the relationship between their emotions and their memory, beliefs, thoughts, etc.

Love

16

Why is the spoon sitting on the left side of my desk different than the spoon sitting on the right side of my desk?

17

A few questions which, mentioning no names, might shear through the woolly thinking here:[ul][li]If all of your atoms change over the course of say, a year, how can you be said to be the same person as a year ago?[/li][li]Is 4 ‘different to’ 5, or is it ‘80% the same’?[/li][li]If your genetic structure defines you, how are identical twins different?[/li][li]If there is a feasible explanation of all aspects of ‘self’ solely by appealing to meat, memory and sensory input (eg. emotional response as chemically regulated by the amygdala and hypothalamus), , is a ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ a necessary entity in an Ockham’s Razor sense?[/ul]I believe that the only way to resolve these questions is by placing memory as the central arbiter of what distinguishes a ‘self’, since different people can have the same genes, emotions and theoretically even atoms if all of the atoms constituing a person one year formed someone else the next. [/li]
Zag: There is no spoon. But seriously, forks…

Memory effectively incorporates the nature of that difference between the spoons, since the two identical twins will accrue memories via sensory inputs from two different points in space.

18

While in one sense, I would agree, in another sense I think the whole notion of a “self” is an illusion (a necessary ilusion, but an illusion nonetheless). In other words, what happens if I awoke one morning with no memory? Do “I” cease to exist? If memory is the arbitor of selfhood, then the answer is yes.

19

King Milinda went up to Nàgasena, exchanged polite and friendly greetings, and took his seat respectfully to one side. Then Milinda began by asking:
“How is your reverence known, and what sir, is your name?”
“O king, I am known as Nàgasena but that is only a designation in common use, for no permanent individual can be found.”
Then Milinda called upon the Bactrian Greeks and the monks to bear witness: “This Nàgasena says that no permanent individual is implied in his name. Is it possible to approve of that?”
Then he turned to Nàgasena and said,
“If, most venerable Nàgasena, that is true, who is it who gives you robes, food and shelter? Who lives the righteous life? Or again, who kills living beings, steals, commits adultery, tells lies or takes strong drink? If what you say is true then there is neither merit nor demerit, nor is there any doer of good or evil deeds and no result of kamma. If, venerable sir, a man were to kill you there would be no murder, and it follows that there are no masters or teachers in your Order. You say that you are called Nàgasena; now what is that Nàgasena? Is it the hair?”
“I don’t say that, great king.”
“Is it then the nails, teeth, skin or other parts of the body?”
“Certainly not.”
“Or is it the body, or feelings, or perceptions, or formations, or consciousness? Is it all of these combined? Or is it something outside of them that is Nàgasena?”
Still Nàgasena answered: “It is none of these.”
“Then, ask as I may, I can discover no Nàgasena. Nàgasena is an empty sound. Who is it we see before us? It is a falsehood that your reverence has spoken.”
“You, sir, have been reared in great luxury as becomes your noble birth. How did you come here, by foot or in a chariot?”
“In a chariot, venerable sir.”
“Then, explain sir, what that is. Is it the axle? Or thewheels, or the chassis, or reins, or yoke that is the chariot? Is it all of these combined, or is it something apart from them?”
“It is none of these things, venerable sir.”
“Then, sir, this chariot is an empty sound. You spoke falsely when you said that you came here in a chariot. You are a great king of India. Who are you afraid of that you don’t speak the truth?”
Then he called upon the Bactrian Greeks and the monks to bear witness: “This King Milinda has said that he came here in a chariot but when asked what it is, he is unable to show it. Is it possible to approve of that?”
Then the five hundred Bactrian Greeks shouted their approval and said to the king, “Get out of that if you can!”
“Venerable sir, I have spoken the truth. It is because it has all these parts that it comes under the term chariot.”
“Very good, sir, your majesty has rightly grasped the meaning. Even so it is because of the thirty-two kinds of organic matter in a human body and the five aggregates of being that I come under the term ‘Nàgasena’. As it was said by Sister Vajãra in the presence of the Blessed One, ‘Just as it is by the existence of the various parts that the word “Chariot” is used, just so is it that when the aggregates of being are there we talk of a being’.”

20

Memory is not just long term - there are different ‘levels’ of memory ‘lasting’ from fractions of a second to decades. Indeed, it may well be that the “illusion of consciousness” is itself little more than the sorting of immediate sensory input (including chemical ‘emotions’) into these different memory levels, all the time ‘cross-filing’ the new ones with the existent ones in a process called ‘learning’. In that sense, being “awake” necessitates that you have a memory.