Do 'I' actually exist?

[charlou]

I'd be fucked if left to fend for myself in an unfamiliar environment without having acquired the skills and knowledge to survive. We all would. Severely autistic people have carers because they don't have the capacity to learn the requisite skills to survive in their environment. Even the carers of autistic people would be fucked outside their skillset.


I grow a few things, but not even approaching enough to survive .. my particular learned skillset involves going to work to earn money to go to stores to buy what I need to survive. That's it. In a different environment I may as well be autistic for all the good my particular knowledge and skills will do for me.

[JimC]

I'd be fucked if left to fend for myself in an unfamiliar environment without having acquired the skills and knowledge to survive. We all would. Severely autistic people have carers because they don't have the capacity to learn the requisite skills to survive in their environment. Even the carers of autistic people would be fucked outside their skillset.


I grow a few things, but not enough to survive .. my particular learned skillset involves going to work to earn money to go to stores to buy what I need to survive. That's it.

We have evolved to be social beings, to live and survive by working as a group. We are not relatively solitary survivalists like tigers or orangutans; our skill sets complement each other, so the whole is more effective than the sum of its parts. Simple trading is one expression of this...

[charlou]

I'd be fucked if left to fend for myself in an unfamiliar environment without having acquired the skills and knowledge to survive. We all would. Severely autistic people have carers because they don't have the capacity to learn the requisite skills to survive in their environment. Even the carers of autistic people would be fucked outside their skillset.


I grow a few things, but not enough to survive .. my particular learned skillset involves going to work to earn money to go to stores to buy what I need to survive. That's it.

We have evolved to be social beings, to live and survive by working as a group. We are not relatively solitary survivalists like tigers or orangutans; our skill sets complement each other, so the whole is more effective than the sum of its parts. Simple trading is one expression of this...

Yes, that works when everythings going well .. Things don't always go well. Nature, depleted resources, political change, war, etc ...

Oh yes, we're all relatively comfortable, but I'm not so naive to think that this can't change and what good will my acquired knowledge/skills be then?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's account of the war affected refugees in her book Infidel really brought that into stark focus. People she'd seen only weeks earlier, comfortable, rotund, healthy ... were wasting away in the dust.

What does that say about this topic?

[JimC]

Charlou wrote:

What does that say about this topic?

Well, it is certainly only a topic of interest to people whose material needs are currently being met...

Actually, I should change that. Intellectualising and verbalising about it over the internet is a luxury we can afford and devote time to because of our material position; the topic itself, at the deepest level, is relevant to anyone, anywhere, anytime...

[Hermit]

Descartes, conducted a thought experiment. He set out doubting everything that could be doubted, and see what was left. The only indubitable proposition left in the end was this: "I think, therefore I exist". End of story.

Perhaps the question, "Do 'I' actually exist?" is miscast, given the context of the ensuing discussion. Should it be recast as "What is the 'I' that exists"?

[DRSB]

Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not--But You Can Have Fun Trying

"Let's say you transfer your mind into a computer—not all at once but gradually, having electrodes inserted into your brain and then wirelessly outsourcing your faculties. Someone reroutes your vision through cameras. Someone stores your memories on a net of microprocessors. Step by step your metamorphosis continues until at last the transfer is complete. As engineers get to work boosting the performance of your electronic mind so you can now think as a god, a nurse heaves your fleshy brain into a bag of medical waste. As you—for now let's just call it "you"—start a new chapter of existence exclusively within a machine, an existence that will last as long as there are server farms and hard-disk space and the solar power to run them, are "you" still actually you?"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... H_20101229

[FBM]

If memory were the 'I', the Self, then what about people who have lost their memory? Are they no longer selves? Memories are also very plastic. They aren't constant, but the conventional 'I' is most commonly assumed to be the same identity between birth and death ("I" was born in...) Some or most memories change, some are lost and many people have 'memories' that are altogether false. We were discussing this in another thread recently.

If one's 'I' is some constant that persists from birth to death, as I think the conventional meaning of the word implies, I just can't see how memory fits that definition.

Much the same goes for consciousness.

For a very detailed, systematic, in-depth and comprehensive explanation of the Buddhist concept of anatta, I'd strongly recommend Chapter 3 of this book: http://books.google.co.kr/books?id=bK6O ... &q&f=false

[JimC]

Descartes, conducted a thought experiment. He set out doubting everything that could be doubted, and see what was left. The only indubitable proposition left in the end was this: "I think, therefore I exist". End of story.

Perhaps the question, "Do 'I' actually exist?" is miscast, given the context of the ensuing discussion. Should it be recast as "What is the 'I' that exists"?

Certainly the concensus seems to be that an "I" exists; as you suggest, its nature is the real focus. We all seem to recognise that it feels like an I of some sort is there, captain of its own domain, no matter how illusory this is when examined at a deeper level...

Examined by...

[Trolldor]

To all extents and purposes a human is an earthworm with the capacity to waste time with rubbish questions about the concept of 'self'.

[JimC]

If memory were the 'I', the Self, then what about people who have lost their memory? Are they no longer selves? Memories are also very plastic. They aren't constant, but the conventional 'I' is most commonly assumed to be the same identity between birth and death ("I" was born in...) Some or most memories change, some are lost and many people have 'memories' that are altogether false. We were discussing this in another thread recently.

If one's 'I' is some constant that persists from birth to death, as I think the conventional meaning of the word implies, I just can't see how memory fits that definition.

Much the same goes for consciousness.

For a very detailed, systematic, in-depth and comprehensive explanation of the Buddhist concept of anatta, I'd strongly recommend Chapter 3 of this book: http://books.google.co.kr/books?id=bK6O ... &q&f=false

I agree about the memory, but not "consciousness" (mind you, this might be a definition thing...)

Memory is at least a strong bolsterer of a sense of self; loss of memories hampers it, but does not remove it. I see memory as something that everyday consciousness makes use of quite seamlessly, but memory is not self...

To me, self is a little trick of the mind that emerges from materialistic neural processes; it feels like there is a permanent JimC floating disembodied somewhere, steering this hunk of meat around, but I know it ain't so...

So, a useful by-product of consciousness, one that works for hominids in tricky environments...

[JimC]

To all extents and purposes a human is an earthworm with the capacity to waste time with rubbish questions about the concept of 'self'.

I contemplate earthworms as I dig over my compost; the smell of the freshly turned organic material, the worms being utterly true to their long annelid heritage, re-cycling our hosehold waste, making the sweetest compost...

When I dig it into the soil, and fork it over, nothing else matters...

[charlou]

If memory were the 'I', the Self, then what about people who have lost their memory? Are they no longer selves?

For them, they're the version of self that they're left with. What you or I think of them is irrelevant (we're talking about the concept of "self" here) .. that goes for anything in existence, actually. A germ is whatever concept of "self" it holds, as is a rock, a flower, a dog or me. "Self" is self defining, and if a rock has no sense of "self", an autistic person has some non-descript notion, and I am self aware, then that is the correct version in each case.

[charlou]

+ I don't think ones concept of oneself, and existence are synonymous.

[FBM]

Jim, I agree with everything you've said so far, but I would definitely extend the no-self thing to consciousness. Consciousness isn't an entity, either. It's an ongoing process, hardly steady and hardly the same from moment to moment. More than anything, it's a fleeting emergent property. In the same way that you might analyze the whole human in the search for a Self, you can examine consciousness itself for self-hood. Is the consciousness reading this post the same one as was born on your birth day? Is it the same consciousness that graduated high school? The same consciousness that woke up this morning? If you answer 'yes', I'd challenge you to pinpoint something that remained unchanged throughout.

Most people at that point would resort to producing abstract concepts. But when people talk about their 'I', do you think they mean that their 'I' is only an abstraction or something concrete? In my experience, people think of themselves as concrete beings, so abstractions such as tendencies or patterns of behavior wouldn't match, seems.

Here's a bit that includes some discussion of how and where the first person perspective is produced in the brain:
http://home.uchicago.edu/decety/publica ... tyNN01.pdf

[JimC]

+ I don't think ones concept of oneself, and existance are synonymous.

Agreed. I think it might be worth separating a "concept of self" from the experience of self. I doubt very much that any other terrestrial lifeform has a "concept of self"; that needs words, symbols, associations, logic...

But I would not say the same about an experiential self. Some form of internal perception of oneself as an active agent in the world, even without the complexity and internal narrative that swirls around our own human experience of self, is likely to occur in a greater or lesser extent in many creatures...