I hinted at this topic in a thread a while back, but it never really took off due to preoccupation with clones amongst other things.
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=163254
Anyway, what I am curious to know is, what constitutes ‘me’?
Is it my body, my mind or both? Are mind and body the same? Can I exist without my body? If so what function does my body serve? What about changes over time? Do my changing mental states mean I am not who I was 10 years ago?
Opinions…?
I was just reframing this same question to myself yesterday. In linguistics there is the concept of alienable versus inalienable possession. In a basic linguistic sense a woman’s purse is considered alienable (not inherently a part of her), while a man’s nose is considered inalienable as it is an inherent part of him. But obviously a man can get his nose cut off and he’s still him. He’s him without a nose. So I was thinking of this question using terminology I hadn’t thought to use before - are any of a person’s possessions inalienable? Fully considering that question, doesn’t identity itself become exposed as a mere convention?
Your relationships.
You are a process, a phenomenon, of inter-relationships held together by memory/experience and extending as far as its control limits, as they relate to other phenomena. Mind/Body but manifestations of the same process within a different cotext and the imprecise boundaries of its extended power/knowledge.
You are a piece of the flux, temporality, multiplicity cutting away (seperating) or cutting into (assimilating/absorbing), or attempting to, towards the absent singular also called by many other human metaphors such as God, One, Absolute, Self, Completion, Stability, Power, Freedom, Here, Now - all of which are both vague and unattainable.
You are the incomplete, unstable part trying to be other than, and find identity in, and by being other than finding the clarity and objectivity to know beyong self-interests, preferences, ideals, fears and hopes.
You are a creator of meaning and purpose, if you are bold and strong, or a seeker and follower of meaning and purpose if you are afraid and weak.
You are either assimilated or the one assimilating, the controlled or the controller to whatever degree they are possible and in relation to other phenomena.
You are a biological organism, evolved during millions of years of reactinos to environments and determined by this heritage which you carry with you as a code; a biological organism adding its own reactions/decisions to its past and trying to overcome what programming is detrimental to the present environmental conditions, towards compeltion or contentment or an end that is neither possible or definable.
You are something and nothing simultaneously, an in-between your abstractinos which you use as a grid to determine your presence.
But most of all, you are not me. :-"
It’s an interesting question. The first thing that comes to my mind is that we ought to distinguish, right off the bat, between the actual self (if there is one) and the words and concepts we use to refer to the self. No matter where I look, I can’t find an actual self (my physical body notwithstanding) although I certainly have a concept in mind of what one is and a word to go along with it. I’m a monist, so I’d have no qualms going along with the materialist in saying that the self is a neuro-chemical phenomena, but I’m a different kind of monist, one that places mind before matter in the hierarchy of fundamentality. At the end of the day, I think I’d have to say that the “self” is simple all that you are conscious of, including that very consciousness.
Interestingly, I wrote a bit on this question, and I’ve come to the conclusion that although the “I” is one’s consciousness and all the things that consciousness experiences, in attempting to self-reflect and experience this “I” (as though it were another object in the world to be experienced), it ends up separating the “I” from its own experiences - thus you get a sense that there is an “I” but without being able to identify it, and you still maintain conscious awareness of your experiences, but you lose the ability to recognize that the two are one and the same.
I don’t think they are. if we admit the man without his nose is still the same man, then nothing of his body can be ‘him’.
Does that mean because I have different relationships now than I did 10 years ago I am not the same person? What if I terminate all my relationships, do I cease to exist?
Can you be sure I am not you? Would a schizophrenic be considered one or two people? If it is one, despite the dual identities they possess, then how can we know you and I are not competing identities of the same mind? How do we come to know there are two distinct minds?
So ‘I’ am everything I am conscious of? I am this keyboard, I am this lamp, I am you?
More or less… it’s very much like the Buddhist concept of oneness with everything.
I do think there is no evidence for any stern “individuality” implied in the cosmos. Although there is a skull separating a brain for efficiency of a sort of “rational unit,” there is nothing cosmologically cutting off those neurons from becoming displaced, mingled with other neurons outside, augmented with cybernetic stimulators. There is no central figure that seems to dominate those neurons as the slaves to a master.
“Me” or “you” cannot even be scientiffically separated in terms of neurons. The chaos of particles influence the charges of those neurons, triggers of the hypothalimus, cause-and-react of sensory.
There is a theory (uh-oh, google mission) that the oscillations of living cells are mathematically central between the other oscillations of objects in the universe. Forgive me for my poor explanation, I barely understood the theory at all. But if that makes any sense, then maybe there can be thought something “mystical” or phenomenally distinct about the building blocks of life.
As long as I see little physical evidence, though, I feel no attachment to believe that this little chaotically rational unit typing letters on the screen is little more than a pawn of a large vast game. That it could live and die, and it is as little material of a difference as the leaves on a branch. But its actions, its survival, and its morals, its ideals, do have relevance because even the pawn can largely affect the game, and at the other end can become a queen. We don’t see the whole board, why should we assume it’s meaningless.
Oh come on now. That was a cute metaphore.
Virtually indecipherable. But it sounds sagacious!
Yeah? Which piece?
I’ve never seen temporality and multiplicity cut away at stuff. Can you draw a picture of that?
Hey, here’s a question: Is the absent singular an Absolutely Absent Singular?
And what again is the reason they’re unattainable?
But there are no parts, at least no parts that aren’t composed of sub-parts. See baby, that’s why I’m you and you’re me.
Can you feel the love?
Or just plain old deluded either way. 
Written by a Borg-esque visionary!
Then how is it an end?
I can go with the something and nothing simultaneously, but you’ll have to convince me that you understand the illusion of linearity.
Well, personally speaking, I have to admit a certain amount of relief that this is conventionally true in our case. And since ultimately, I can’t describe how how it really isn’t true, it doesn’t bother me so much.
Tu Weiming describes the self as a series of relationships forming a series of concentric circles. The middle point is what we mistake for “ourselves” but we are really the entirety. As for the relationships, of course they change, we change. But the circle closest to the center point is the family. And you’ll always be a part of your family, won’t you? So in that manner the self remains somewhat consistent.
You are an extremely clever animal which has been coaxed (from birth) into societal constraints and normative relationship values
Upon reading the Treatise, I’ve been more and more wondering about the idea of personal identity.
I’m more and more inclined to believe that we can never truly uncover what ‘me’ is.
For me it is a bit like a Rolf Harris drawing, where he starts with a series of lines, and as he draws more it becomes apparent what the picture is. However unlike Rolf’s drawings, for us, the beginnings of the picture fade and dissapear. No one could assert they can fully remember and visualise all that has happened to them in their life. Some memories persist, but even these are falliable. Indeed all we can see in the drawing of ‘me’ is the current perceptions. By the time the drawing is complete, we have no idea what the beginning was like. We can never experience the whole picture.
Is personal identity then, a trap we fall into from a very early age, from which we cannot escape? Indeed the mind as it develops asserts the existence of ‘me’, to explain the similarity of its experiences.
Can personal identity be innate? Are we born with a sense of ‘me’? I can’t see how we can be.
We accept the false notion and the world is explained in terms of continued identity, for to not accept it, would involve re-wiring of the mind, that may not even be possible.
Personal names are very nearly universal; neither the Golden Bough nor Herodotus ever speak of any peoples who did not use personal names, and to name something is to in some way recognize it; even if I weren’t at first to recognize myself I would be pointed out to myself by others.
With animals it is a little different; some pets even are not given names, and it is really a matter of opinion whether or not animals have much of an idea of themselves; evolutionarily speaking it would be a good guess that personal identity preceeds homo sapiens.
In law, it has often bothered me that a person sitting on trial is never the same person who is accused of some crime; the inner person is not often important to law, though there are some exceptions such as drunkenness, insanity or emotion.
With respect to your OP, it is obviously unclear what you (as mind) are; mind can not in any way be accessed by any sort of microscope or instrument for evaluation.
From time to time someone does fall apart and has some sort of identity crisis. This can happen at different levels, ontological questions, doubts about agency, self-perception, worth, gender, age, ethnicity, purpose and function, social status, parentage and so on.
Something odd happened to me one evening a few years ago; I had come in off the balcony and turned on the television; but I could not stop thinking about who the actors really were, or that there were blokes in caps and drinking coffee from styrofoam cups just outside the camera; that moment ruined the magic of cinema for me and has ever since; I would expect that this sort of thing is quite common among people posting on this forum with respect to themselves; some illusion about self was revealed or disrupted and can’t be un-seen once it slips out.
To a lesser degree a similar thing happened a week back after watching Dark Side of the Moon (French documentary) video.google.co.uk/videoplay?doc … 0&hl=en-GB ; I had wanted to watch a video about the lunar landing as hoax; and after watching the video was really dumb-founded; I could not see in what way I could decide whether or not the lunar footage was genuine or filmed in a studio; I then began to wonder on what basis I believed all sorts of other things; a mini-epistemological crisis descended on me… until a little reading about William Karel’s film reaffirmed my safe little knowledge.
Don’t try to use words you have no personal experience with.
An emerging one. A yet to be completed one. A Becoming.
A drop of water in a river, momentarily flowing at a different speed creating a mini-current.
Consciousness, sweetie, is distinction. The less conscious you are, or make yourself, the more you lose yourself in the flow; a mindless, non-distinct flow.
Why do you think the weakest amongst us are the ones more adamant about surrendering to the group or the flow. They have the least to lose. They have the least sense of self and the least love and appreciation of self.
Need/Suffering is the price of self, as it resists the flow. It is the sensation of the flow.
Sure, a cell. An organism. A rock.
Metal is hard because it flows (it’s temporality is less) at a slower rate in relation to the observer. It appears to him hard and unchanging when it is changing, but at a different rate.
This differentiation is what I call ‘cutting away’.
Consciousness is discrimination, a cutting away. Unity is the elimination of this consciousness, towards a hypothetical higher one.
the organism surrendering to the super-organism, just as a cell becomes integrated within a body.
The body may reach a level of sophistication and achieve a higher level of consciousness, but this would also entail the total destruction of the cell’s awareness and individuality and distinction.
The cell is turned into a specialized, automaton, working away, dying and never realizing anything. In fact any realization would prohibit its harmonious integration within the whole.
Stupidity as a virtue. Oblivion as cost for relief from responsibility.
Consumerism: The cells feeding off the super-organism’s blood flow.
No. There is no absolute. An absolute is a human invention, a simplified abstraction, meant to direct and focus consciuosness, and to allow for knowledge and experience.
Like your feminism it is an ideal with no reality. It is a human invention with particular motives and social necessities.
I love the sarcasm.
Two reasons.
1- They would have already attained it - given the continuous flow of time - thusly putting an end to existence.
A true singularity would absorb the universe within its mass.
A theoretical Black Hole is not a completed singularity. It approaches completion and that’s why it appears like it is dropping out of existence. It’s temporal signature is decreased and so its spatial possibility is also decreased.
At the speed of light, theroetically, a physical body would be flattened into a spaghetti string (a visual metaphor) because the temporal increase in possibility towards one direction results in a decrease in all the other possibilities. Space being temporal possibility.
2- The absolute is a human invention, based on the simplified abstractions and the words that symbolize them.
The minds cosntructs simplified models, snapshots, of the flow, so as to make it comprehensible through finding patterns in it.
That’s what knowledge and awareness is. This so as to make its focus, towards self-completion, more efficient.
Try not to use yourself as an example.
Please, call me Satyr.
Better than being an emotionally driven romantic naive pseudo-intelelctual twerp.
Are we here to exchange opinions and ideas or are we here to socialize, regurgitate cultural norms and progressive trends - without even defining progress - and sooth our anxieties by using self-serving ideals?
Your attempt to escape your nature and reinvent it, using current cultural ideals, is obvious.
You can’t escape something you deny is there. you can only close your eyes to it and pretend it isn’t there, forever condemning yourself to be a victim to it.
Shall I repeat?
The universe doesn’t give a shit how you see it or interpret it, but how you see it and interpret it will determine your understanding and destiny within it.
It isn’t, that’s the point.
There is no end, as there is no beginning. There is only continuous flow and a continuous fragmentation, within our perceptible horizon.
Now you might ask what this means?
Well, in my view, time flows continuously in all directions. As many directions as there are dimensions.
Entropy is growing and decreasing simultaneously. Thusly the continuous flow. The Big Bang is merely the event horizon of our perceptions; the point of near completion, the nothing/something nexus, the almost singular.
We can only perceive one temporal direction because of the very nature of life and the consciousness it produces.
We are a pocket of emerging order within the disordering. Knowledge is an ordering of sensual stimulations into mental models. We are a resistance to this flow. Experience of the flow is only possible in this temporally liner direction for this reason.
To be conscious of any other direction would contradict the very nature of knowing. I cannot know anything in the reverse temporal direction (keeping in mind that the directions are infinite, or perhaps like physicist tell us ten. Who knows?, and not only two), because then as an emerging resistor or pocket of differentiation I would have to be disordering in the ordering - or unknowing, forgetting. From death unto life.
I think this is where all these concepts of paradise and nirvana come from.
Maybe you can provide an example of your understanding of both, before I wade in.
You are the expert, after all, in all things spiritual and eastern. I want to hear from a true Buddhist.
Wow, did you just insult me?
Deary, you are so girlish.
I like how you present yourself, along with others, as the one that will call me out and cut me down.
I don’t know everything, that’s a fact, but I have constructed a viable, cohesive and rational explanation for all that I perceive.
You have surrendered to the mystery and what feels good.
Meditation must feel great. An ephemeral respite from the conscious awarenes of the flux.
A relief from self within some imagined Oneness or emptiness, or whatever. The sense that you are experiencing the source, your authentic essence, when in fact you are becoming unconscious of it and the images your subconscious visions with the added advantage of being disengaged.
Kind of like getting drunk.
No pain. Numbness. Escapism. The adoration of your own annihilation. Extreme self-denial.
To return to the state you were before birth but to, conveniently, retain life. This is your authentic essence.
The fatigue associated with existence and experiencing the flux, manifesting in a desire to escape the emerging unity that makes it possible and dissolving yourself in the current. No more to resist; surrender. No more suffering because of no more consciousness or awareness.
The living dead.
“I wish to die…” the religious mind screams “…but I want to live while I’m dead.”
The after-life.
At least the honest nihilist wants to die, period. He wants to be diluted into the flow, forever.
No, ‘but if’s’ for him. Self-hatred coupled with a more honesty disposition.
Vengefulness in all of them.
This mistaking is bothersome.
Why multiplicity or an illusion at all?
The reason is, in my mind, that there’s an absence, a lack, an instability, a forever towards.
Why would Oneness produce multiples or be active at all? The Oneness is incomplete.
Is not even the concept of One a human invention; a generalization?
Depends. I think of reality as a hermeneutic process. Some call that an illusion but since I don’t think any reality lies beyond that, I’m not so sure what that means. Basically I’m asking, “If what I perceive as reality is an illusion, what is real?”
As for an “instability”, I couldn’t agree more. My metaphysics finds its roots in the Classic of Changes and that is all about instability. I’ve talked about this before, but there is a crisis of language where we conflate “being” and “becoming”. What we perceive as “is”, that is something that linguistically we say is “being” is actually engaged in a process of “becoming” while what we talk about as changing actually describes the constant status of a thing. The White Cliffs of Dover is an example I like to use. They are only white because the limestone is constantly engaged in the process of sloughing off impure particles (as we’ve defined. We can get into the chemistry of that if you’d like. Purity exists only from a point of reference) leaving the pure white-ness of the limestone behind. If the cliffs were truly “being” white, they would actually be black but since they are “becoming” white they remain white to this day. As soon as we seek to stabilize something, we’ve misunderstood it.
In that way, “complete” can only refer to something in the process of change and transformation. Something that is “complete” by the standards you’ve established is only “complete” for the briefest of instants after which point it fades into oblivion. Outside of the most rarified academic spheres, what happened at such-and-such a time to the infinite decimal place at such-and-such a place to the infinite decimal place is really quite irrelevant.
Witgenstein was onto something.
Language, hell knowledge and experience, all depend on this simplification of reality creating this illusion of absolutes where there aren’t any.
Language is an art form using metaphors similes and allegories. Talent rests in using these symbolisms to express a sensation.
Taking it literally is a a sure sign of a simple mind.
What’s an absolute?
Short answer:
That which is absent.
Alternate answer: It is also known by other names such as God, Perfect, One, Whole, Here, Now, Self, Singularity, Completeness.
It is an absurdity even as a mere concept.
All that can be said of the imagined absent is that it is absent. One feels this absence as need/suffering.
That’s precisely what I’m avoiding doing here, taking language literally. I’m doing my best to correct that fallacy in your thinking.