Not really, your senses never change to other “senses” and the you are you assumption is not always correct, people mistake people for other people all the time.
This is just an exercise of confirmation bias.
It seems to me we change from moment to moment, both our physical makeup and our life experiences and other aspects of our being or personality. That there is an underlying “self” is an illusion derived from our access to memories.
Science is an abstraction. It does not believe anything.
“Scientists” would have to collect some data on the soul to comment scientifically.
psik
We get hungry and thirsty and warm and cold just like others animals. We see, hear, inhale and exhale, eat and drink, digest and metabolize our food, have sex and conceive young and raise them, age and die, and even eliminate waste the same ways as animals.
Of course we are animals.
The question is what sort of animal. Are animals sentient? Most are (at least among mammals and birds) in that they experience their world via qualia and respond via a combination of instinct and emotion. It is said we are intelligent, and this is true in some ways but in other ways one wonders if maybe we have defined “intelligent” to fit us.
That’s not true; they “are outside of science” because they don’t exist, not because there’s anything inherently untestable about them. If they did exist there’s no reason to assume that they or other “supernatural” things would be untestable by science. Historically in fact many believers both scientists and non-scientists assumed that many such religious beliefs would be testable and provable - they only retreated to the “beyond science” position when science kept disproving their religions.
Descartes said the soul is housed in the pituitary gland. As far as I know this has never been tested, and I can think of ways it might be.
Doesn’t lack of existence make them untestable?
But then maybe it just means we haven’t gotten the technology to do the test yet. When did the van Allen belts come into existence? Did they not exist because we had not found them yet?
psik
I don’t think it’s possible or desirable to define what can be tested by science and what cannot; the tendency in the West to do this is just so scientists can be polite to religionists.
The continuity is a lie. Dennett goes into this in some detail in Consciousness Explained, but basically the continuity of your state at any single point in time is an unbound lie you tell yourself, based on your memories and also your internal states - all post hoc.
In other words, Last Thursdayism?
I wouldn’t say the continuity is a lie but only an illusion; there is a reality that generates it. It is just that people misinterpret the chain of consciousness.
same-same. Lies-to-self are still lies.
A multiplicity of realities, actually.
There is no “chain” - that’s not a misinterpretation, it’s completely wrong. It’s a web, not a chain.
In a personal sense, kind of, yes. But I prefer to think of it as an ever-refreshing narrative that acknowledges and pays homage to its predecessors. We are pastiche.
Hang on a mo; why are we skipping the two things you’ve mentioned? The application of drugs and physical damage to the brain both would seem to fall under Voyager’s point that it’s parts of the brain that personality seems to arise from. Affecting the matter shouldn’t alter who “I” am unless “I” am a construct of that matter.
Sheesh you know how to nitpick. You know what I mean and can’t correct it but do anyway. I am not impressed.
When we sit quietly and “watch” our minds function (actually just recall the state our mind was in a moment ago) we observe thoughts, emotions, incoming sensations, memories, all in a loosely connected (somewhat causation driven but somewhat random too). We call this the chain of consciousness although as has been pointed out “net” seems a better description.
It is not a soul nor any sort of homunculus, or a self. It is a process – like a wave – perpetuating itself or being perpetuated in some other way. It also constantly changes, but we nevertheless perceive personality there – that the way our mind goes differs from how other minds go – but this personality too constantly changes, we suppose because of life events.
This is what we perceive: that there is brain stuff (neurons firing and neurochemicals being moved about) modern science I guess “tells” us, but the links they have proposed, while intriguing, leave a lot unanswered, and seemingly unanswerable (especially how brain creates the experiences we call qualia).
:dubious: Says the guy who started off by correcting me
I can correct it, you just don’t like that I did.
And I should care about impressing your newbie self because…?
Mmm. You perceive that I corrected you about something, so you scrutinize everything I post so you can find something to “correct,” even if it has to be invented or just a nit?
Welcome to the internets, where we take sentences out of context. Try emphasis mine, it is more genuine.
Hrmm.
Nope. Nice try, though, but no - I disagreed with you drawing a distinction between lies and illusions, when it came to personality. That’s not “picking nits”, that’s disagreeing that it needed correcting in the first place. “Lies” covered it quite well. Yes, they are illusions, but illusions are lies. Perhaps you’d agree to settle on the word “deception” as a middle?