O.K., I know this will sound real corny, especially if you’ve read other stuff I’ve posted…
Every morning when I wake up, I am always in the same body. I don’t wake up as you. I don’t wake up as anyone else. It’s always “me.” In other words, what I define to be me (my consciousness, my self realization, or whatever you want to call it) is in my body, and I would assume (physically) located somewhere in the brain. Now here’s a question that has been bugging me for a long time: If a different sperm had fertilized my mother’s egg when I was conceived, would I, Crafter_Man, still be here, but perhaps in a slightly different body (different facial features, hair color, height, etc.)? Or would I be gone for eternity? If that latter is true, and given the fact that there are millions of sperm, am I just one lucky bastard?
Do you understand what I’m getting at? I’m not just some robot mechanically making my way through life; there is an inner “me” that I am acutely aware if. (I’m assuming this is true for all humans.) I view this “me” separately from my physical body. So asking again… if a different sperm had fertilized my mother’s egg, would I still be here? What if my parents had decided to wait another year to have children? Would I have never existed, and a different body and consciousness born instead? Or would I have assumed a different body resulting from the new egg and sperm?
I guess the whole idea of me / my consciousness is extremely perplexing to me…
ok you would not be you if another sperm entered the egg. hell if the situation was the same like same sperm and everything you would still not be you. there are millions of posibility from just one sperm.
you are defined as one living in your physicall being. you are you and if one thing was difrent during the pregnancy than what it was you would not be you you would be someone else. so yes you are one lucky bastard to be who you are.
i am sixteen and have takin advanced bioligy and this is what i understood to be near the truhful awnser of you question.
This probably will get moved to GD but what the heck.
The question is not one of biology but philosophy/theology depending on your outlook. The idea of being a different consciousness if a different sperm had fertilized the egg is a moot one because this consiousness wouldn’t exist for it to be different from. Self awareness is not completely seperate from the biological entity but if you had an identical twin from the same egg and sperm your twin would have an entirely different self awareness.
Ohhh-kay. This is a bit out of the range of GQ, so I (whoever that may be) will move this over to Great Debates. By the way, Cecil once tried to answer the question What is consciousness? I’m half convinced that this particular column was written by a computer.
Am I the only one who thinks that this particular sixteen year old should spend more time concentrating on his spelling, grammar and punctuation and less time worrying about the advanced questions of biology?
We were born when a particular sperm met a particular egg.
From that meeting all the particles in our bodies were created. Our consciousness is a product of these particles. I had no consciousness before that particular sperm met that particular egg.
If I had been conceived a year later it would have been a different sperm and a different egg so the particles would have been different.
Since my consciousness is a product of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg creating that particular blend of particles then any other blend of those ingredients would result in a different consciousness.
I understand what you’re saying, Jojo, but I just have a hard time accepting that my consciousness (“me”) was entirely nonexistent before the fertilization process. (And I’m trying to make sense of this without the aid of religion.) Maybe there will never be an answer…
Uhh, excuse me if I disagree. Everyone’s opinion is equally important regardless of age. Would you take offense if I said that you should spend more time concentrating on the question at hand rather than putting down other posters? Oh, of course you would, because it’s offensive. Now, I suppose, you know how ‘that particular sixteen year old’ is feeling.
I know precisely what you mean! It’s nice to hear it from someone else. When I was a kid I was preoccupied by these thoughts for a long time. I remember distinctly sitting in the girls bathroom in grammar school saying “I am me” over and over again until I paralyzed by the scope of it. I tried to look at who I was from someone else’s point of view to try to figure out who I was. Was I my body? Was I my thoughts? What made me me? Eventually I started to think about all the people who weren’t, that is, all the people that could have been if my parents had conceived me on a different day or a different time and wondered if they were someone else now. THEN, I got really scared and thought that maybe I wasn’t really me at all, but someone else! How would I know! As far as someone else who could have been my parents’ kid instead of me, I was someone else. But did they know that they weren’t and I was? Could I have been the same exact me with different parents? Maybe I was! How would I know?
I think what might have sparked it off was a Shirley Temple movie in which she and another kid played the future kids of a couple. I think they were in heaven and could see and interact with these people, and at the end of the movie, they became this couples’ kids. I don’t remember it exactly, but it really confused me.
I have no answer for you, but I felt the need to chime in. It was like deja vu all over again when I read your post.
For some extremely interesting insights into the origins of consciousness and its functions read;
“The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”
by Julian Jaynes.
One of the principal functions of consciousness is metaphor. This function is responsible of the analog “I” that so many of us use to relate to ourselves with. Read the book, it will astound you even if you do not agree with it.
Heck, do you even remember anything that happened to you before you were 1 year old? Maybe your consciousness didn’t even exist before your earliest memories, let alone before you became a zygote.
How do you know when your first memory was? Maybe you remebered something from the day you were born, but you forgot it when you were 3 days old. Maybe you remembered being in the womb the instant you were born, but it’s lost now. Hell, I forget TONS of stuff.
I always fancied the idea that if we actually ever were able to figure out what made us tick - like exactly how the brain and conciousness work - that we would just cease to be. Maybe implode, or maybe just end.
Um, do you suppose there is some place somewhere where all these disembodied pre or potential consciousnesses exist?
Are they just floating around in some communal reservoir, or does each person possess a certain number of the should they wish to reproduce?
And what possible mechanisms could exist for them to be assigned to specific zygotes/fetuses/infants at what point in their development?
Don’t know about you, but I’d find it much easier to believe in religion.
Well, I am religious, but I was trying to logically reason it out without its “help.”
Maybe it’s just a trick my brain is playing on me. Like I mentioned above, it’s as if the “inner me” is totally separate from my physical body. In other words, it’s as if, at the time of my conception, the essence of Crafter_Man was placed in the jumbled mass of cells resulting from the union of the sperm and the egg, and after death it will be put back.
Geeze, listen to me; I’m scaring myself. :eek: I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I have an inability (or “mental block”) to imagine me being forever gone after death. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense.
Maybe I should just stop thinking about it and go eat some ice cream.
Ah yes, perhaps you were pondering on the possibilty that there is no you after death for eternity and in grappling with that realised that there probably wasn’t any you for eternity leading up to your birth.
Of course it’s difficult to grasp, by imagining what it might be like to be non existant you try to imagine something when you need to imagine nothing which, I think, is not possible to do.
Try to remember how you felt in 1647BC and that’s much how you will feel in 3007AD.
I suppose if you are religious you don’t really need to get worked up about this though do you?
There have been people with brain damage whose sense of self was affected. Similarly, there have been all kinds of publications recently about the brain activity people have during moments of religious enlightenment. They (and me once) feel like they are one with the universe, which feels different than feeling like you are you. The brain has capacities for making you feel like yourself. If you want to believe so, God might have made you to be able to feel these things.
I know there are specialized neuro scientists working on this question, mostly helping amputees with phantom pains. I’m trying to find out more because I constantly experience a feeling of being out of my body, like my experiences are out of sync with my senses, and that I’m not real. I’d rather believe that there’s something wrong with some neural pathways than that my soul is defective. If I learn anything interesting in any sort of timely way, I’ll pass it on.
Speaking of that religious experience, I had it back when I was smoking the drug. Marijuana combined with sleep deprivation gave me the feeling that “I’ve melted into the thread of the universe.” Based on the gibberish I made up at the time, you can see how hard it is to describe. My sense of self was changed, and I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that the chemical changes to my brain caused that.
Also one time, I conceived of what it felt like to die. I have absolutely no way to describe that either, but I tried to kill myself about an hour after the realization, so it might be dangerous to try without the proper training.
In conclusion, there’s a neurological basis for consciousness, and it neither confirms nor denies your religious beliefs.
It’s interesting that most of us tend to define what we mean by ``I’’-ness as an overwhelming feeling of uniquness: there is no one else exactly like me. And yet, we aren’t really any more or less individual than any other macroscopic object, cows or trees or rocks. In fact, only fundamental particles are truly identical objects.
To be sure, we feel our distinctions are somehow more interesting than the differences between one squash plant and another, but this is the purest anthrocentrism, it is not mathematically defensible.
Also, we tend to feel fascinated and threatened by things that make us feel non-unique. Consider the horror of the doppelganger, the fascination of the multiple-personality schizoid, if they really exist, or the many versions of the tale of Jekyll and Hyde. We are liable to bristle strongly at any suggestions that we are in way replaceable.
So perhaps one major aspect of I''-ness is being passionately -- even unreasonably -- devoted to the proposition that one is unique. From this point of view, the nature of your I’’-ness, what most makes you you, is something that everyone feels and in practically the very same way. That is, the thing that you might most strongly identify as what makes you you is in fact ubiquitous and inevitable. The most essential quality of you – your conviction that you are unique – would be essentially identical no matter what sperm you descended from.
Your real distinctions from other people probably like in mundane things like minor differences in speech patterns, skills, and thinking abilities. How else could it be? The most important behaviour traits – and a sense of ``I’’-ness is unquestionably core to what we are – are strongly constrained by our evolutionary history to be adaptive for our environment. We are only free to vary where it doesn’t matter so much. It’s like building cars: the most important characteristics of cars (wheels, enclosed place to sit, lights for night driving) are strongly constrained by what the car is supposed to do. It’s only in the detail painting and flash where strong variability can be tolerated.
