Changing cells does not mean our thoughts, memories, or sense of who we are changes. This is the exhausting part of conversations with you. You rotate through a series of scientific discoveries and make up meanings for them. I’m going to start closing your threads if don’t stay on one topic.
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Well the changing cells part is an old argument I heard against the notion of who we are changing.
It is old. But what do you think? This is the purpose of the forum, to say what you think about the topic. I’m going to start considering that a rule for you. Normally it’s not a problem when stray of into talk about what others think, but you blur the lines, sometimes claiming that what others think bothers you, then when challenged, you dismiss it as just something you read.
Like here, is this
And what does it mean to you?
Or, in regards to time:
Not good in what way?
The purpose is what is true, not really what I think per se.
I don’t know. I don’t really understand it, and that’s why it bothers me so much. It’s not just this, apparently some models of time in Physics say nothing happens like in Block Universe or some schools of Buddhism,
like people just stop caring about others or that it’s pointless to.
That’s an honest statement. I appreciate that
Not everyone. Not sure how many. I don’t think that’s been well studied. It’s definitely not automatic and there are plenty of cases where people go on caring
Well the thing is that stuff like you’re saying about the self very easily leads to posts like this one from people in computer science who just view us as information or programs:
I do not view consciousness or the illusions as discussed here.
The illusions we have are instrumental in our survival as a social animal.When I call something an illusion, I do not imply that it is false - only that it is apparent - and more importantly, pragmatic.
It may help you to know that I have been designing and coding software for half a century now - so how should I view the human nervous system as other than an information processing system.
Our first illusion is that we, personally, exist. Of course we do exist, but we generally view ourselves as a being in a body bounded mostly by our sensor-ladened skin acting as a unified self in a social environment. There are conditions where this illusion fails (ex, anosognosia or asomatognosia) but we can always expect that the rest of society will treat us as a single being. And as a matter of survival, when part of us fails, it threatens our whole being. So having a built-in model of ourselves as human with a single agency is very pragmatic.
Which brings us to the second illusion - that we can affect our condition and our surroundings. We have a built-in notion that we can make choices and act on them. This is not to say we can’t affect things - but it is significant that we hold a view that we can. Your iRobot may plan out a strategy to clean your floors in a short time while keeping itself charged. But it has no sense that it can affect its environment.
Which brings us to time. Not only do we have a spatial (skin-bound) view of ourselves, we also have the notion that what we remember from the past represents a real human being - the same one that exists now - and that will continue into the future. And we are built to record to memory pleasant and unpleasant events - and to view those memories as clues to how to make our world “better” for us.
So Physics gives us a 4D world and we evolve a built-in story about how we work within that world. Our illusions are personally pragmatic models of the key concepts important for our survival.
Now let’s talk about consciousness…
Everything I just described above could be programmed into a machine - resulting in a robot that in principle could operate within human society as a human. And it would not be conscious. If you think otherwise, you have to explain to me the fundamental difference between an abacus, Babbage’s Analytic engine, and contemporary computers. And if you think its complexity, how large does a Rube Goldberg machine have to be before it becomes conscious? Computers are not conscious; large networks of computers are not conscious; and if all of a sudden something fundamentally changes when you interconnect processor number 1 billion, what you have is a network problem - not consciousness.So why are we conscious? Apparently, there are basic information-processing components useful to our survival that are easier to implement in our biology in a fundamentally different manner than the way it is done in a digital computer. And it is this different component that caries with it the foundation of consciousness.
What is important for this discussion is that the illusion of time is simply a possible content of consciousness, not a direct consequence of it.
And I don’t know what to think about it.
This forum is for inquiry. That inquiry should be by the participants. A long quote from a link followed by “I don’t know”, is not fitting.
Read the guidelines. It’s not explicitly stated, so I’m not warning you, yet, but, it is implied. I ban a lot of people who post a link on their first post, and it’s obviously a commercial. Large quotes are copyright infringements.
But, more important, if I want to go look for someone else’s opinion, I’ll do that. I can’t engage with a quote or link. Tell me your thoughts, or go engage that other person.
I told you I’m not sure what to think about it. Like to me it feels like reducing people to robots, mere nerve impulses. That the richness and value of life becomes more of an illusion since…I don’t know…it doesn’t seem like we are anything more than that.
And if that is true then I’m not sure how to look at people. Who am I falling in love with? Is there even a “who” and it’s not just some collective illusion when in reality it’s just a bunch of cells and mostly water? What’s the right view here? Am I making friends with some “one” or just glorified electrical currents?
it’s not like someone can hold me and tell me things will be ok, I might even begin to doubt it because of the above. But these are questions I don’t have the answers to and yet they affect how I see and treat people each day.
Which is not a comment. It’s a non-comment. Then you follow up with the questions that keep asking and others keep answering. That’s repetitive posting. A more explicit guidelines.
Well I don’t have an answer. I did elaborate on it in the above one where I thought it reduced people to robots and as such I’m left uncertain about how to treat them. To me, there being no “self” sounds like there is no one who is there. When you say the self is an illusion it makes me think people are not real.
This is further compounded when I hear people saying there are a number of functional illusions that we operate under and it has me wondering what else in my life isn’t real, or what could be called real. After that it feels like letting go of that is just living a lie, giving into the dream and just living in ignorance.
You have been “just asking questions” for years. When people make suggestions, talk about alternate views, and ask clarifying questions, you dismiss, deflect, and bring in new questions, over and over.
Fair enough. Looks like we’re taking a break so I can’t resist there’s a freaky & fun song and since it’s at a lull I figure why not add a little emotional relief.
I’m was never familiar with Ian Dury, though I heard his stuff long ago, recently I came across the song that’s become an ear-bug. One that gets triggered by reading and thinking about your words.
Then I fished around in his collect and found one that feeds right into the sort of existential angst you enjoy basting in, or at least that I’ve heard screaming through some of your comments.
Either way, here’s a taste of a guy who is arguably the father of punk, though he’d of drilled you for saying so.
Cheers, enjoy your weekend (these are the good ol’ days)
No, it’s not that. I reminds me of . . .
(I don’t belittle it one bit, I’ve seen the damage done to good people up close, so though I’m straight, I have empathy . . .)
I did give an answer
And then, this comment pops up
I just gave the quote with my answer to what I think about this:
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I also explained why not having direct access to reality bothers me, especially reading stuff like this:
It goes even deeper than that. Nothing that you experience in your life is at the “real-world data-level”. It’s all just abstractions. You see the color red, but there is no red in the real world, just a continuum of wavelength energies. You see red because you aren’t seeing the light, you are seeing the abstraction of neurons at lower layers of your neural network that are taking in the real-world data and outputting a “feeling”, which is what you sense.
You feel pain in your arm when you pinch it, but nerves in the arm can’t feel, they can only sense. Only brains process pain. You don’t have a brain in your arm, or more accurately, your arm isn’t an arm, it’s part of your mind. You are experiencing an “avatar” interacting in a simulated model of the world generated within your own mind.