The opposite of you

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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The opposite of you

I am going to make an argument which is the opposite of those I have been making recently, I have said for example, that one could replace parts of the brain until the whole has been replaced. However, as a small child i lost my hearing for a year or so, and after it returned there was and has been sinse, a kind of disconnection from the world. The nuerons grew back to replace those damaged such that the instrument was restored and I could hear, but i had to and sometimes still have to concentrate to hear. It is as if my consciousness is trying to leap over an obstacle, the instruments are in good working order, but the hearing is perhaps a new neuronal matrix.

In the more general sense then; if we replace one part with another part, we are not adding to the original matrix that the consciousness is on or uses. If we then continue to add & remove parts, an increasing disconnect will occur. If my changes had been more severe i expect i may have heard voices in my head and other such conditions, then the more changes are made the more this would increase until you have a different ‘matrix block’ sufficient to denote another personhood/consciousness [similar/same as the case of the conjoined twins sharing a brain/head].

Perhaps mental health issues can occur when evens unfold to dramatically change ones life, such that it is equivalent to physical damage in the above sense?

It annoys me how people don’t see mental health as physical nuerons, and little different if it is broken to a broken leg. The nhs is at no’s1 with their loving caring song, but you’ll experience a different entity if you attempt suicide.

Back to the main focus; is the instrument ‘the opposite of you’? And we move further away form the original matrix as we change? Is there an original matrix?

No amount of instrumentation will yield another you.

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It looks as if personality types are more nature than nurture, the very young exhibit traits that later on in their adult life are seen as belonging to firm personality types.

This being said, a little brain trauma or stroke can cause the brain to switch it’s primary consciousness to another area.

In regards to what your talking about, yes… human personalities are determined by behaviors, how we order our senses and think. If you start shutting off the senses to someone, it’s doing to lead to abnormalities as the individual is forced to adjust. Brain cells compete for nutrients, and nature abhors a vacuum… it’s all going to be reprocessed eventually to become something else.

This being said, I wouldn’t slap a limit on medical science just yet. I don’t agree with ideas like Moral Nihilism and whatsnot because I know the mind is a competing synergism, an active, responsive dialectic machine… it’s adaptable by nature, but largely fixed in processing and variability… even in cases of chromosomal abnormalities or lacking essential in fetal development such as cholesterol, still produces forms of retardation that relates to normal people without the disorders, and show stable behaviors as a group. When the brain malfunctions from a lack, be it retardation or lesions, it’s still calculable, because as a social species we adapt at look at what still works (or kill them, or put them to work in a bell tower, if it’s the medieval era).

I think this synergy can be interpolated by machine parts some day, same as plugging a USB device into a computer. Wont be easy, cause there is nothing simple about our neurons, but we will eventually get there, have hardware that slides in effortlessly (in a matter of speaking, brain surgery sucks, but controls operating off of brain wave patterns already exist) and will work first time around. Someday, instead of downloading a philosophy book on your kindle, you may download a philosopher to your brain, like Harvey from Farscape.

There is the Cartesian Mind-Body Dualism, but also neuroplasticity issues of a organic, adaptable mind. Your not really in new territory in any of your posts. I suggest watching Farscape, they explored ‘your ideas’ a little better in depth with Crichton’s cursed brain implant, “Harvey”, how Harvey started off as a alien personality clone belonging to someone wanting to unlock some hidden information in his head… the removal of the device in brain surgery (was a season cliff hanger), and the impossibility to eradicate the program because it embedded itself in his head.

At times Crichton controlled it, it controlled him. It recognized it had no independent existence outside of Crichton, but still felt it was different, and when it found out it’s original, real life source died, tried to take over, seeing itself as the rightful continuation of that persona… but usually it just kicked back in Crichton’s memories having fun. It had a hybrid personality of the two after a while.

Really, I would just go watch that TV series before posting anymore.

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Your brain can probably already do that, but i think it is limited in what it presents to the consciousness because the consciousness only perceives a small amount of mental objects. I take your point though, if you wanted to be able to do that, for a student or whathaveyou downloading books would be good.

I do watch farscape btw and every sci-fi film or show thats been on TV, sometimes multiple times. I know i speak of old issues, but i try not to simply reiterate like a parrot? and we have many recent experiments and technologies to rethink the whole thing with. I don’t know how you came to that conclusion really. :confused:

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Stopped watching that show because I like being comfortably asexual and whenever I’d see the thief girl I’d get overwhelmed by romantic feelings (because I am narcissistic in nature and she reminded me of me, her voice, mannerisms, she had blue skin and white hair also.)

As for the consciousnesss thing, I was thinking, as I always do, that consciousness is at the center of the universe, a small ball, with rotating convection currents outside of it, looping out then in, in then out, out then in, if that’s the right word. Basically, it is empty, only experiencing the visual directly, until demons enter near it, projecting their voices unto it. Eventually complexity arises where it can no longer understand itself any further, because the memory is too vast to remember in real time, one meta consciousness frame. Therefore, the demons are only consciousness because they are near the consciousness sphere, outside of it, they lose their consciousness. Ie. you are not real, solipism, I am the only real one, until the consciousness sphere approaches you.

Hollywood and movies imply this will be never, because of the seriousness of death portrayed, and the vastness of lifeforms in the galaxy…would the consciousness sphere, like Santa Claus, really take the time to visit and breathe consciousness into all lifeforms? Therefore life and evolution, must not be mistaken as inherently conscious, for we do not know even if intelligent aliens are inherently conscious, unless they are near the consciousness sphere. Therefore the word life, must not be thought of synonymous with the word conscious. Perhaps Earth, being near the center of the cosmic microwave background, is near the consciousness sphere, and my body is of mere coincidence, merely happening to be most located near the cosmic center upon birth or my childhood. Perhaps my special qualities, have arose as a causal result of being united with the consciousness sphere, as it is invisible it but ultimately, Visible, it may have some energy qualities which enhance the lifeforms it contains, thus the strength of demons, multiplied over years. It may be suspectible that the more secrets of consciousness may be revealed through a loose interpretations of the readings of Jesus Christ.

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Trixie z or what do we call you for short now? and are you actually female? you seem so, but you could be gay instead for all I know. :evilfun:

If it is that it is this first…

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=189372

ergo, it is not that! Consciousness is what happens when you group observing particles in a pattern/matrix, such that they act collectively and with single stream or focussing of that. There is no such thing as awareness, there only exist behaviours of relative observers, and collections of that [things, world, universes].

Interesting observation, how the media are attempting to tell us that. I dont think consciousness is breathed into lifeforms, it simply occurs where observing particles are streamed via an instrument, and hence become a singularity ~ a matrix acting as a cohesive entity or even the product of that as itself an entity [like colour or thingness etc].

Can we not be sure that; 'where the means to produce a given thing is arrived at, then the same result or product of that will always occur. So aliens and all life-forms will have some manner of consciousness, as long as they have neurons or an equivalent arranged in an informational matrix.

Thats an observational perspective property of light, it cannot be what defines the infinite universe.

_

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Alright, you changed it up then. No real reason to give offense.

Its the activity of the pattern that determines consciousness, not a verbless noun. Consciousness doesn’t exist unless it’s dynamic, dualistic. You dump liquid nitrogen on a liquid terminator, it’s a dead icecycle.

Is Omnipresence or Will to Power Consciousness a verb or a noun? Noun, with presumptions of action occurring somehow, though Zeno’s paradox would suggest otherwise.

Its a size paradox… is a thing more than it’s phenomological status? We presume we know a thing because we can identify it, put it in a scale of physics. We relate concepts, but these concepts fall prey to universal resizement, like in the Banach Tarski Paradox:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox

When we try to mix verbs and nouns together, we hit the pythagorian restrains on how we mnemonically access memories of things, they can be congruent yet still relative, because we think in terms of Formlines, and have stereoscopic vision. We name big things after small, unrelated things.

newworldencyclopedia.org/ent … _Macrocosm

We can get mystical, or we can ask ourselves why we do this. Form lines dealing with fractal patterns to the nth degree, on a macro and microcosm… very interesting. Saying a eye looks like a nebula from point perspective, or a mesa like a table, different concept, using similar equipment, and not so impressive. Saying “evolution exists” and define it down reasonably to the most tiniest detail, impressive… till we look around the world and antiquity and see very similar systems popped up with similar modulation, and assurity. Then you got to look at cognitive conditions for thinking through ideas and projecting them logically in reference to illustrations and scale… is the science a priority or posteri?

We recycle a lot of “ideas” in our heads, because our brains, as amazing as they are, isn’t that complex, and when systems and comparisons start matching up, I just proceed on my initial investigation that the same aspects of mind was used to construct them… be it karma and dharma, or the various evolutionary theories we produced in the west since Christians first took a interest in the idea in the late Roman Empire to the present.

So I like to look at parameters for an idea first, where we can expect it to take us. In linguistics, I pay attention to paradoxes in size first… it yields to our conclusions of depositional characteristics, such as in mapping. The universe may have the seeming dazzling complexity to be alive, on a Panthiest level, but is it? Same with microcosms, is there a star system inside every atom, civilizations growing on quarks, are we that for something much bigger, like the end scene from “The Men in Black” suggested, or are we smacking face first into resolvable issues regarding memory and projection of congruent ideas? How do we make mathematics immune to such ideas when our Laws of Thermodynamics demand a constant, and we apply it universally without questioning scale? We’ve hit a roadblock regarding black holes, our scientific consensus is something has to give eventually, a cherished concept… this is one of three on the chopping block, but no one wants to be the first to do it. If they don’t speed it up, I’m going to Henry IIIV out of it.

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That is what I get for solving consciousness, being asked if I am gay? What is this I don’t even, I am not getting paid enough for this shit.

Change your avatar, A, because it is too brown and gray and dingy looking and I can’t concentrate or focus when it is in my peripherals.

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^^ my avatar is sci-fi and miserable because that’s how i like it. I change them every now and again, but it will probably still offend your eyes because its the way you are looking at it, and not a problem with it itself. Please accept my apologies about the gay thing, i was jesting with you.

Turd Ferguson
Your post displays the reasons why i use the analogies of instruments, rather than attempt to portray things like consciousness in a given object-based linguistic expression. it ties itself up in knots and seems to decline the invitation to look at behaviours instead of objects.

It may be ‘aware’ if observing is the most rudimentary level of that. To be alive you need and array of observations in a focal stream perhaps? This where behaviours change the manifest state of things, so if you got an instrument that can observe and not just see ~ as like a camera [which is probably an eye without an observer inside it], then their mass of behaviours and patterns manifestly consciously see. So no i don’t think the universe can see in a focused way, as it has no instrument of the eye to focus. equally it doesn’t have the function/instrument of observing multiple inputs at once ~ like the one inside our heads. It surely ‘sees’ at the most rudimentary level of observation [as can be measured [something the greeks didn’t have]], but on an infinite scale.

I am not sure what that would be or if the behaviour ‘observation’ as seen in particles, is in any way the same as the observing consciousness. I cannot think of any other simple aspect of existence, which has properties one could attribute as the fundament of perception/observing? I mean as we experience it. A camcorder with another camcorder inside would be something akin to the instruments of the mind, but that wouldn’t be observing no matter how many eyes we give it. Which if true rules out the instrument as cause and means to our observing quality of mind.

Why would there be unobservable phenomenon in a universe entirely composed of observers? If there were, they could make no effect anyway; where effect = the measure of relative observers, and the imaginary star systems would not be making effect i.e. Do not ‘exist’. At most we could say that there may be reals that are not physical and have no effect, but then why would anything be making an effect upon it? No relationship means no correlation, nothing to denote that the inner star systems should hang out around particles, or should be relatively sized et al without comparisons.

Do it! :slight_smile:

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it aint the way i am looking at it, i try not to be looking at it! Didnt you listen to Aussie, she said your avatars mess with our unconscious!

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Who’s aussie? Where did she say that? I don’t mind removing it if that is the case, but it just sounds a tad neurotic. How can a small image fuck with your subconscious when there are only simple concepts in the image?

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Ugh,…its subconscious…its moreso the aesthetics than the concepts…aesthetics are instantaneous, concepts are carefully analyzed by the conscious mind…we are talking about aesthetics, not concepts. No amount of conscious programming will get me to think clearly with those aesthetics around.

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This is where Nietzche is great! The nature vs nurture issue is solved by a prepondirence of evidence, well not totally. But the forces of nature, regardless, weather which way they are steered toward, opt for the most advantageous route. Creation becomes a non issue, upon the development of analysis, and the analysis of the created becomes identical to the analysand. God becomes man, through analysis. Science not only bears this responsibility, but eventually is short circuited as the limits are reached.

Here lies the problem in a nut shall, the creation is demoted, and man has removed himself from the created, God is transformed into a scientific disclaimer, and with science denied due to its inherent limitations and flaws, no metaphisycs is possible.

Within this scenario, the Will looses its efficacy, because force which propels it does so with predictable and verified means. Good and Evil will not determine any outcome, only blind applied force , dictate the terms of the evolutionary nature of the cosmos.

But if this were the case of the grand workings, then how is it we as humans are here, with what remains of our limited artifacts?

If, God was invented, it was for a reason, it was done, in line to overcome the grossest delusion above all else, that is, to let analysis become it’s own creator. To proclaim otherwise is a good example of reverse pantheism, since it’s either one, or the other.

I am afraid both are possible, but between heaven and hell which would you choose?

Any limited belief system suffers for its limits, and one is closer to an absolute then the other. In very simple terms, whereas science believes it’s terminology approximating closer to it. But there is denial in that very conception. Unless, it believes it has a privileged position in creation.

If this was not foreshadowed by theological material, There would be doubts, but it has been, very far before the most rudimentary ideas in science.

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If it wasn’t so, the whole idea of recurrence would not have meaning. Humanity could be viewed as a species, perhaps the first, and maybe the last. Nothingness would overcome Being, and that would settle it. However if that were the case, nothing would or even could support Being, because coming to be, on the lowest level would be impossible. That we are first and last, as Human beings, would limit the existence as well, and undermine any credibility for its suppositions.

The very suppositions may be equally questioned, and consciousness itself would ,could be questioned.
And if there is doubt, the necessity for a creative consciousness would disappear. Therefore, to the question, to be or no, the answer would have become a resounding no. Humanity would have to have been never born. There , time as trillions of years, would have no need to be counted.

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Interesting. This squares perfectly with a theory of mine about how the brain works. Subjectively speaking, what I think happens when a certain “autonomous” part of the brain breaks down is that the conscious mind–our ration thinking and awareness–must take over, for the function of this part of the brain is executive–it deliberately decides what to do. And this executive power works on inner mental abilities as much as on behavior. So if it suddenly requires effort to hear sound, this is a result of the conscious mind all of a sudden having to do the job–to decide to do it and consciously do it. This may get easy over time, like learning to ride a bike, but it will always require having to make a decision to do so.

Is this what it’s like?

This is like the ship of Theseus. How would the subject know he’s become a different person? I mean, if the transition is continuous and smooth? I suppose you could say that at the point when there no more remnants of the old person, no more parts of the brain that are “original”, for in that case there couldn’t be any question, but it also means that the new person only ever emerges at the brute end of the process.

Well, sure. Stress has a tendency to cause mental disorders. They call it PTSD.

I’d be careful with defining mental health in terms of neurons. At the end of the day, it is true–mental health has a lot to do with neurons–you might say everything–but keep in mind that it is those very neurons which have the task of defining mental health. What if we define mental health as such-and-such a pattern of neural configurations, or this and that kind of neural activity? Then what if it required breaking from that pattern, from that activity, in order to figure out a proper definition for mental health?

This again sounds like the ship of Theseus. We are never the same ‘I’ twice–and yes, this has everything to do with changes in neuronal configurations. But I think there will always be recurring themes that reinforce the ‘I’ that I may have been at one point or another. I will always call myself ‘gib’ for example. My neurons will never change such that I suddenly recognize myself as ‘Amorphos’. Although I will think of myself as ‘gib’ at one point, and then leave that thought to think about something else (say, what I’m going to have for dinner), and will, at some later point, return to the thought that I am ‘gib’, and that will be physically represent in my brain by the same neural activity.

So, yes, we are a river that is never the same one twice, but you might think of it as the cycling of the weather/eco-system. The river spills into the ocean, the Sun heats it up, it evaporates and becomes cloud–the cloud moves across land, over mountains, and it rains–the rain freezes and turns to snow, becoming glaciers on the mountains–then summer rolls around and melts the snow, it becomes water, it becomes a stream that trickles down the mountain and flows into the same river from whence it came.

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The problem of the Gib/Amorphos is the same as between similarity/difference. In the idea of similarity, how many true absolutely different creatures could You find between them, on the large cosmic scale of possibilities? I would imagine if one took trillions of repetitions and close the circle by 2 totally indifferent beings, that would suffice. Indiscernible is a better word. But the number would be much higher, perhaps it too would approach an infinite number. Therefore opposites are another example of trying to differentiate before finding similarities. It is an unjustified negation.

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Recurrence is not needed to support consciousness. Consciousness seems to be a download bar for an even larger, hidden consciousness. Life, more or less a training simulation or documentary for the larger consciousness. information is forgotten, but deep down, spiritually retained, like childhood.

So, it is not recurrence which is needed, but a layering, ie. a viewer of consciousness. Recurrence partially fills this condition, thus your mistake in claiming its necessity.

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Having never read about the ship of theseus before, i assume it sounds like a final fantasy boss, i will present a story which I assume is basically its gist.

Two people are in an operating room. There is a consciousness transferring device. It transferes no memory, only conscious awareness. So bob becomes jane, and jane becomes bob.

After the procedure, theyd have no way of knowing, it would feel like nothing ever happened, ie. jane remains jane, or so she thinks, bob remains bob.

Thinking about this, it implies I, Trixie, am the ultimate lifeform of the galaxy…i am what everyone becomes, because I was always me. It also implies a spiritual awareness…like there are part of us outside our brains, our experiences and memories have spiritual constance, that is how we are so shitsure we are us, and noone could pull the janebob thesues experiment on us and get away with it.

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A, you make claims that aliens have consciousness, yet you claim you cannot even isolate the cause of observation and consciousness.

unless santa claus theory is true, they don’t have consciousness. If someone is not Me, how could they have consciousness, if I will never experience them in a past or future life? You mentioned this concept…if universes are inside atoms, they don’t exist, because there’s noone to see their existence. I Am All There Is.

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This larger consciousness would fold up like a damp pack of cards, in time of incredible passages of time, and sans subsequent recurrence would become a mere in-it-self, which, would serve only as an everlasting paradox, for tons of future philosophers to endulge with. No, contrarily, it must be of a logical certainty, so as to equip the ability of those notable men to negative themselves. The absolute necessity of this is beyond all understanding, it requires supernatural demonstration.

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Gib

I think that is right as far as privileges are concerned, but consider that i was about 4 yrs old at the time, and about a year or so later the hearing returned. That’s what i mean; the instrument fixed itself but would have grown different to what was their before. I don’t think the consciousness can take over function, if the inner/outer eye or ear is broke the consciousness cannot make up for that. I assume that with brain plasticity a new ‘growth’ would be incongruous even though it provides the same function as an instrument, as it had before.
I am tempted to go as far as this being true if we took it to far extremes, and replaced individual neurons or even the nerve cells which combines them. Because every functional aspect of the brain is a) changing, and b) relating/exchanging i.e. To a constant fux of information from one another. If there is a break of any kind there follows a distinctiveness, if this is singular or a collection. Ergo one can have the same instrument, but not ever the same singular matrix. We could call this inner blindness perhaps? It is as if there is or would be blind-spots in the way the consciousness relates to brain function ~ which would still be using the new growth.

Consider how [in experiments] when sleeping, the conscious function is visibly limited [on scans] to a small area of the brain, and yet the whole brain is showing as much activity as when waking [or nearly as much]. So the brain and consciousness are two ‘beasts’ both making utility of the brain, but as you say the consciousness is subjective. In this way we can see that the consciousness could potentially be ‘blind’ to some aspects of the brain, whilst the brain remains fully functional.

It to me is an important thing to consider, in an age when the technology is nearly upon us. I can only imagine that if we kept add/removing parts of the brain, the consciousness would end up dead and be replaced with something almost the same. Then that other new you will be getting the same causal derivative informations as you did, so would possibly think it is still you. …little different to twins or clones etc.

A new born’s new experience of eyesight renders them blind, they can at first only see blurred light. Their brain maybe fully functional [i think?], but the consciousness takes time to learn how to see prior to it being able. If there was a disconnection as being put forwards here, it would probably be noticeable and readable. I expect the person would over time feel disconnected like they were having someone else’s memories and thoughts?
The ethical thing to do would surely be to not undertake such operations, until we know what consciousness is and hence can determine for sure if it remains in place after any or all instruments/parts have been replaced.

My feelings are that we can eventually learn every thing about the brain, even the function of consciousness, what it is in physical terms, and it wont yield anything about what the consciousness IS!

This no more than looking at a music system can tell us about the music it is playing. There are observable realities like colour and music [qualia [and yet are in the world as well as being mental qualia?!]], which are the product of a physical system, but are not present in that [like photons are transparent, frequencies are those moving up/down and along at a rate].

The inner ear [as in my case] is like a different cutting of the same record, it does exactly the same thing [as the [thing that was there before] ship of Theseus], but is not the first pressing, and so isn’t worth as much [is not the ship of Theseus].

- the opposite of you.

Indeed, mental health is as much the music as the record manifesting it. Then as the brain also interprets ‘the music’ [and doesn’t know the other records et al], then it is the music which is making causal effect, and not the records.

_