this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse
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What do you mean by this?
If you don’t separate the lobes, then you still have a single connected network of neurons, which probably forms a single mass of experience. It’s cool and interesting if you want to question that, I can see some possible lines of argument, but none are obvious enough that you can just gesture at them and people know what you mean.
Experimentally yes, but not experientially. You either experience the next instant or you don’t.
We’ll probably never know, so there’s no reason to worry about it—although that won’t always stop someone in a bad headspace, hence the spoiler—but if you like thinking about how consciousness works, then the idea inevitably comes up and needs to be acknowledged.
Unfalsifiable does not mean stupid to think about.
For starters, it’s intrinsically worthwhile to map out the space of possibilities, even if you might never be able to narrow things down within that space. But also, it’s a necessary step if you want to really convince yourself that it is unfalsifiable. You have to actually consider the relevant thought experiments and their ramifications.
Unlike solipsism, continuity of consciousness is a question you can actually reason about. You can study the brain, the neurons, the synapses, to see if any physical process looks continuous for the whole brain over time and space. Roger Penrose, for quantum mechanical reasons, thinks experiential consciousness resides in the microtubules, which are cytoskeletal filaments inside the cells of the brain. Others argue pretty strongly that there is nothing special about microtubules. But there’s an actual discussion! Even if it turns out to be unfalsifiable, the discussion itself will have been fruitful because it helped us determine that.
Materialism tells you why things happen, it tells you where thoughts come from, why the brain does what it does, which is great, but continuity of consciousness is a more elusive question, because it has no effect on a person’s brain activity or behavior. A perfect clone with the same memories is indistinguishable from the original, unless you actually track the whereabouts of the original and the clone to prove which one zapped into existence 30 minutes ago.
Maybe you feel that’s worthless to think about, but we’re already in a thread where OP is thinking about it.
OP imagines their subjective experience continuing after a prolonged interruption of existence. Dialectical materialism and quantum physics do not readily tell you if that can happen.
I was under the impression she was referring to dissociation, but I’ll leave that to her.
For my part, I agree. Sorry I came off as a metaphysical chauvinist or whatever. I’m actually known to speculate openly at length on philosophical topics many find boring, irrelevant, opaque, etc. I am in this thread because I have thoughts on the topic and am interested in the thoughts of others.
My understanding is that dialectical materialism is a powerful conceptual framework that has its limits when it comes to ontology and other speculative matters. All ways of understanding have their limits, but it’s worth investigating to find the limits. In this case I don’t see any conclusion to be drawn from the scenarios presented and am instead arguing for the Buddhist position of the empty nature of the self based on dialectical materialist epistemology I presume many of us are able to agree upon in some sense and consider. From the basis that the source of all knowledge is practice, experientially we know that all changes and dies, and quantum physics empirically tells us that nothing is the same from one moment to the next. Thus no self essence can be found. This has implications for this contemplation.
When I say “consciousness,” I mean your subjective experience of being alive and not dead, the difference between a cascade of nerve signals and the experience of biting into an apple. How that arises, no one really knows for sure, which is why it’s called “the hard problem of consciousness.”
“The self” and “consciousness” are two different things. “The self” might be illusory—or at least, we might put that label on the wrong thing, and then realize it when we detach from that thing during mindfulness meditation, which can be a profound experience—but consciousness is deeper than that. A tardigrade probably has no sense of self, but it almost certainly has some experience of being alive.
In sci-fi, often you can save a copy of your mind, which can then be loaded into a new body if you die. This is usually conflated with immortality. The question is, would your subjective experience continue in that new body, or would it be a clone with your memories? This is not a semantic question, our definition of self does not factor into this. Subjective experience either continues or it doesn’t.
A common argument goes like this: the machine that loads your backup into a new body could easily load it into two bodies simultaneously. Which body would your subjective experience resume in? My brain lobes argument counters this by pointing out that consciousness can split: one thread of subjective experience can split into two. So, if your consciousness can resume in one backup, then in theory it could resume in two or more backups at once. This refocuses the question on the importance of interruptions, rather than multiplicity. Can your thread of subjective experience resume after a total interruption? I don’t know. In my original comment, I consider both possibilities.
I agree. I brought up no self because multiple people in this thread suggested that it could only be “them” if they had the same memories and picked up right where they left off. I find this implausible despite my agnosticism on the question of rebirth. More likely would be the same life lived exactly again from birth like “eternal recurrence” or the widespread idea of samsara where you will simply experience more lives without the memory of past ones (except possibly accessible through meditation).
The idea that it could only be “them” if they pick up where they left off implies that there is a self or soul that continues from their past through their current circumstances. Buddhists have ideas about general consciousness as well mind you.
If you are constantly losing this body and mind then maybe those aren’t necessary for continued consciousness. Buddhism posits consciousness like a flame passed from one candle to the next. Each moment contains no essence from the last and yet it is experienced consciously. It’s not all about seeing through identification (though that is what allows that flame to finally cease), non-self also means that everything else is empty. The concept of essences is just [useful] bullshit. Things still exist colloquially, this is just how things have always been if you paid enough attention.
Thus, I argue that everyone who is willing to consider this question should consider the theory of samsara rather than limiting their thinking with certain fallacious dogmas.