Maybe so, I’m just quoting folks.
That said this related comic has sorta got me losing sleep based on what it says: The Machine - Existential Comics
And this answer from the stackexchange, though I’m not sure their understanding of the brain is correct on this one: metaphysics - Does personal identity/"the self" persist through periods of unconsciousness, such as dreamless sleep? - Philosophy Stack Exchange
No one responded to BoltStorm
I don’t think any of that suggest anti-realism, because apart from quantum physics (which isn’t complete yet so we can’t exactly make a call there) objects in the world do seem to exist and have properties independent of our concepts and beliefs. A plant will be poisonous whether I believe it or not and the same goes for an animals being dangerous not. Even materials and metals that we built society from have properties that don’t care about our concepts or beliefs about them. So far reality doesn’t seem to care about our beliefs about it, our sensory experience of it might just be faulty.
I know, eventually they stopped.
Anyway right now I’m trying to forget what that comic strip said so I can sleep at night.
He figures out there is no grand meaning, and lives a peaceful agrarian life. How does that bother you.
Did you miss the part about death and identity that kept him from sleeping? Because that’s what’s happening to me
No. I didn’t miss it. It’s a story. That’s the part I’m where the man has a crisis. That’s how stories go. Something happens in the world and the man is troubled by it. He fights but doesn’t prevail. Then, as stories go, he realizes something. The problem isn’t out there, it’s him, it’s how he’s facing it. He can’t change how things work, he aligns his perspective with reality, finds how to live in the world as it is, not as he wishes it would be. He wakes up to a new man every moment.
In stories, death is symbolic of change. This story is the ultimate expression of that, with the man “dying” into a new man over and over. Each moment is a chance to be again. As the story says, some think he’s a fool, some think he’s holy
That sounds grim. Like…I haven’t slept since reading that comic because every night I’m afraid I won’t be the same waking up and lose everything. If every day is just going to be a new me then his view doesn’t make any sense. Why build anything or strive for anything if I won’t “live” to see it?
That’s similar to this with the guy suggesting that our brain just reboots and loads old memories to make sense of waking up to give the illusion of continuity: metaphysics - Does personal identity/"the self" persist through periods of unconsciousness, such as dreamless sleep? - Philosophy Stack Exchange
Like…it just seems like a leap in logic to view that as good.
Actually responding to inthedarkness,
Excellent point.
Oh gosh darkness, I’m thinking you are over reacting. You are not changed into someone different. Instead of “change,” try thinking in terms of “reborn” - that might make more sense.
It’s more a reinvigoration thing, having new mental tools to process the day with a new state of mind.
What will you be present to this day, and then into the breach. That sort of thing.
I’ve been reading that line, trying to figure out what you mean with it. What’s not good about it?
I don’t know if reborn is right according to this: metaphysics - Does personal identity/"the self" persist through periods of unconsciousness, such as dreamless sleep? - Philosophy Stack Exchange
Apparently the experience of a continuous self is a delusion because the brain does recall some memories to fill the gap in sleep. I…don’t really know what to think now, especially about what I can call my “self”. Just an illusion huh…
I don’t really understand or know what that means. Is my life a lie then?
That each day is just a brief flicker in the wind the notion of persistence of me is just an illusion. With all that…what’s the point?
I need to lie down, maybe sleep for a long time…
You are the one who came up with this idea of your life being a lie. Have you found a cartoon or article that says that? I don’t think so. Would it matter if you did? Why would someone else saying that make it true? People say a lot of crap. A lot of them are wrong.
Like saying “the self is an illusion”. That’s a statement about our social construction of a description of our complex interactions between a 14 billion year old universe and our one little collection of cells. That it bothers you shows just how complex that is. You are still you. A cartoon doesn’t change that. Awareness of neurology doesn’t change that you are you.
Change happens. That’s the terrifying part of being alive. That’s why sitting by a quiet stream and hearing familiar birds singing is a peaceful calming experience. But, reality happens, and a storm cloud appears and the peacefulness is interrupted. If you act like the storm isn’t there, you’ll get wet, cold, and maybe struck by lightning. So, it’s “a different you” that needs to get " booted up" and go seek shelter.
Those experiences are added to your collection of cells and you are a little different each day. That’s all the cartoon is saying. The identity answer is talking about neurons firing in milliseconds, something we don’t experience consciously. It takes massive amounts of processing to form the picture of ourselves that we have. It can’t be 100% accurate but that doesn’t make it a lie.
If that’s terrifying to you, you’re not alone. If you can find moments of peace, you’re lucky. As Bill Hicks said, “it’s just a ride.”
You’re right, if you want to be stickler over words.
I was trying to convey a feeling, a “sense of”, if that makes any sense.
“Modern neuroscience supports the idea of it being a mental construct produced by the brain as a kind of coat rack for all the things going on within it and associated with your physical senses.”
There’s more to - and the sum total adds up to the simple understanding that we are evolved biological creatures, the product of this singular Earth’s processes.
As with all biological creatures, our bodies have learned, via evolution over deep time, how to deal with the world and itself.
Our body and brain processing the outside world, that is what produces our consciousness. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.
We can add all the words on top of it and around it, but in the end that is our fundamental biological reality of this planet - the human condition.
We humans have an extra special body, experiences, brain and thus produces the most incredible mind, a most amazing, yet simple biological processing machine. That isn’t necessarily up to meeting the existential challenges our insatiable gluttony has created.
Why is it so hard to see your existence in terms of being biological creature living out its singular allotted time?
How can “My Life” be a lie.
You are here. You are who you are.
What would an “honest” you be like?
I’m a scared bunny who looks at a world that’s turned the corner into dystopia, with us being in that wonderful oblivious middle time, before the proverbial poop has full contacted with the inevitable fan. So I wake each day glorying in the peace that still exists, savoring our grand old global peace while we still have, as prepared as I can be for the bottom falling out over the next few years of inept criminals taking over global affairs - what could go wrong.
But then I have the fortunate of living in a different time (child of the '60s, young man of the '70s, possessing a different Earth respecting tree-hugging, tramping, outlook - while seeking a non-consumerist sort of state mind, given to musing on the meaning of humanity’s march of progress, (and the question, towards what?), in a time when there was still tolerance for such fancies.
Oh and wondering what the hell was everyone in such a frantic rush for ?
What are we trying to achieve with all this, too much of everything, never being enough to satisfy ?
I like the positive question. Asking if you’re life is a lie puts a frame on it that is hard to escape. This question is open to possibilities
Well there’s a little more to it then that: Waking Up Lost and Confused | Psychology Today
The whole idea of continuity just being the old memories loaded again bothers me. I know the psych article talks about it being in terms of places we sleep and not exactly the self but I can’t help but wonder what it all means.
I mean that psyche article isn’t too far off from this (which is part of the answer I linked):
“The experience of continuity is an artefact of the brain’s model (even the hardware divides into into short-, medium- and long-term memory architectures), which enables it to sort memories into temporal order and thus build a useful model of past and present events. We only feel the same person each morning because the brain reloads sufficient memories to make sense of waking up, much like logging back in to your user account at work and seeing the familiar desktop.
Now, you ask, when this lot gets shut down and rebooted, perhaps even cloned, is it the “same” self? I hope you can see by now that the “atomic” self we experience and instinctively believe in is over-simplified, and clinging to it is unhelpful. The roots of your self are the mental model and associated memories. Boot those on any suitably architected platform, be it hard- or wetware, a clone perhaps, and it will feel like the same old you. But any clone’s experiences and hence recent memories will immediately diverge to become patently different selves. Kill off the ones with the longest memories and you have killed off your old self, but you can let them live if you want to. Either way, you are still your new self.
So there it is; the atomic and continuous se
you agonise over is a delusion; It vanishes when you go to sleep and gets rebooted afresh for every dream and every morning. underpins it is contingent on its past and survives the night. A clone may be regarded initially as a new “instance” of the saved self, but immediately diverges as a new one. The relationship of the self to those elusive qualities of conscious experience remains the hardest problem in the philosophy of mind: all bets are off.”
I just don’t really know what to think or make sense of anymore in regards to me and myself. If I forget everything I would be different but does what the brain do when you wake up just delusion? That sounds more like their interpretation than fact but I can’t be sure.
This was a more erratic answer on the subject of sleep.
But as for the comic I think it’s based on this thought experiment: Teletransportation paradox - Wikipedia
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
This also kinda messed with my notions of identity because I don’t have answers for them
Yes, it’s an interpretation. As I keep saying, we are on the very edge of understanding of our neurology. Anyone who says “this is how it works” is overstating their confidence. More important, none of this changes your experience of yourself.
You, and I mean you inthedarkness, experience the world through these articles and ideas that you happen upon. I have had breakthrough moments and epiphanies, like many people do, but me and others integrate them into a full life. We discuss them with others and compare notes on how the idea maps to reality. We try out a point of view and see if it helps. If we don’t like it, we search out new data.
You let everything bother you and need complete solutions and complete knowledge of how it all fits. We don’t have that. We won’t have that in your lifetime. We may never have have that.
Why are you afraid of death? Do you believe in an afterlife that may cause you to suffer? You should rid yourself of that notion. You’re not afraid of death, you’re afraid of dying. But when you suffer while still alive, death will end that suffering.
As Anil Seth posits: "when the end comes, there is nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all!
I get that and part of me wishes that were so, but when I read up on it like here: Waking Up Lost and Confused | Psychology Today
I can’t help but wonder if maybe it might be true. I know stuff like this is kinda hazy right now, it’s just that it scares me because I don’t really know how right any of it is and I don’t know enough to research it well or understand it.
Yeah I can’t argue with you on that one, I need the complete picture and despite trying to let that go and be ok with not knowing the terror I feel compels me to seek or to obey.
I don’t really know how to live a normal life because it feels like every new thing I read upsets me, and I worry I might have trauma around all this stuff because I keep getting triggered all the time when I try to sleep…
I’m not afraid of death per se as in my body dying, it’s more like notions like the comic. Even now I have great anxiety around sleeping because of it.
I even asked a question based on a researcher that Crig guy told me about (David Krakauer) and his theory about Teleonomic matter, the dude’s answer got me confused: ontology - Does Teleonomic Matter imply Subjectivity without Identity? - Philosophy Stack Exchange
"Your cells can live independently, especially any stem cells - in principle they could form their own zygotes. So what is their identity? How does it relate to yours? Are slime-moulds collective organisms or individuals collaborating?
Your body is like the Ship Of Theseus, with nearly every single cell replaced over your lifetime. So your identity must be organisational rather than simply material, right? This is an example of substrate-independence.
I mentioned Krakauer, because his work shows a kind of subjectivity, a holding information locally about the environment which can impact interaction with it eg through feedback loops, as fundamental to complex systems - ie to inorganic, non-living, living, and conscious systems, that exhibit complex behaviour. He identifies this property of having a subjective record, the most abstract kind of subjectivity, as fundamental to the emergence of complex systems, and so to any account of abiogenesis and consciousness (eg of identity) that sees them as emergent from non-living non-mental materials. It’s a more crucial shift than may be immediately recognised, because it can help address from the ground-up what an observer is in both quantum mechanics and relativity, and why they matter for physics."
Like…how do I know that’s right? What if it means there is no self, what do I do then? What if me just saying that I don’t know is just hiding from the truth?
I tried to read the links but I couldn’t really understand what he meant in his arguments (it doesn’t seem like science more like philosophy): https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f29a430a2b6a34680879cc0/t/67246c602e20f71f1e247dfe/1730440289240/DK-MultiplePathsToMultipleLife2021.pdf
Like…I have no idea, I don’t understand, and I’m so scared I have no idea what to do. I can’t tell if I’m just saying I don’t get it to hide from accepting reality or if I really don’t, but the more I force myself the less I understand. Yet in real life it feels like I’m being wrong by referring to myself, or to other people as selves, I’m just…lost and in knots that I can’t make heads or tails of things.
