The question of I

I'm still utterly perplexed by my self-awareness. Although I still find the idea of everyone else's self-awareness troubling, it's my own that causes the greatest confusion. There is an obvious parameter-space of all possible humans, all possible personality/memory combinations, but what is the space of all possible awarenesses? Are the two spaces related? The former is continuous, the latter appears more discrete. Is my awareness a necessary member of that space? Are all possible awarenesses realised? If not, what was the probability of me? Vanishingly small? So what does that imply?The confusion is not surprising, given how little we appreciate. The passage of time is not a feature of the Universe, just of our own awareness. 13.5 billion years of time did not pass by until my awareness "awoke". My awareness has always existed. There has never been a time nor will there ever be a time when my awareness does not exist. After I die I will not be in a state of no-awareness, as there is no such thing as "after I die". So I don't even understand what death is in the context of awareness.If you half a clue as to what I am blathering about, please let me know your thoughts, as I'm in the dark. We're talking zombies, teleportation, and quantum immortality.

It's the ninth letter of the alphabet.Question settled I would be careful with that one. "Human" is not defined with the precision of mathematics. That one seems even more iffy. Do I, or do I not count a bee as having awareness? Do I, or do I not count an amoeba as having awareness? So there you were in [msg=-11,14691,-350] pointing out the importance of precise definitions, and now you are using a vague predicate in a quantifier which attempts to appear precise. I am not at all perplexed by that. Nor am I perplexed by my own self-awareness. I am, however, perplexed by my inability to find a way of explaining to other my lack of perplexity. Yes, I think I have at least half a clue as to what you are on about. However, I haven't worked out how to give others my thoughts on the issues. Actually, no, we are not. That you think we are might hint at why you find it so perplexing.Hmm. After reading this, you might be even more perplexed than you were at the beginning.

I is the loneliest nvmber that yov ever knew.- III Canis Nox

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

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We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

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...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

Ok, I'll loosen that slightly to all possible arrangements of matter. That covers your bees and amoeba. Read it as a question as to whether we can get that precise. Helpful. Actually, I'll rephrase that to say that we're talking about the issues that are raised in my head when I hear others discussing these issues. Such as in questions of teleportation, the fact that two camps appear, both of whom claiming to be the materialists, and accusing each other of being the dualists. That such a discrepancy occurs reveals the uncertainty is many of the concepts arising - "death" of awareness being one in particular.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Yes, that can be confusing. I have occasionally been accused of being a dualist. As I recall, it was for saying things such as "mathematics is abstract." I take those accusations with a grain of salt.Consciousness researchers seem to be wanting a reductionist account of the subjective in terms of the objective. I think it very unlikely that such a reduction is possible.The idea of uploading minds to computers is surely impossible (perhaps "absurd" is a better term). I am skeptical of teleportation, though I cannot rule it out as a theoretical possibility.Norbert Wiener, with his work on Cybernetics, was probably closer than are modern AI researchers and cognitive scientists.

What if you could move among the parameters on your space graphs and try on some of the other yous.

Forgive me for not dealing more abstractly with your questions, but I've always used stories and intuition to try to make sense of the world.When I was a kid, I used to go to the wooded creek and sit on the bank, sometimes just to read or daydream or sulk.One day I was staring at the horizon, daydreaming, as the sun set and stars began to appear. Entranced, I eventually simply forgot who I was--literally--realized I had, and then found myself experiencing an overwhelming vertigo as I flailed mentally, trying to remember my name, and what that name meant: Who was I? What did it mean that I could forget?It seemed to me that in that moment of almost purely unself-conscious awareness, there was no difference at all between me and anyone else; this "I" was just a place, and awareness would be the same in any other place, any other person. The more clearly aware I became, the more I was just like other people: the details--what I looked like, where I lived, my family--were trivial compared to this identical awareness. I could have easily been someone else or no one at all. I felt both extraordinarily unlikely and inevitable at the same time--as though the world had be some kind of world but not this one, and I had to be some kind of me, but not this one. Later, as an artist, I learned that one practical consequence was that the more deeply personal I could make my art, the more likely others were to see it as universal.I became an atheist on that river bank some time later. Raised in a fire-and-brimstone church, I worried about being wrong, and I thought about spending forever in hell. I thought about how, when I injured my hand badly, I ran and howled, aware of nothing but flaming pain: there hadn't been me and the pain, only that incandescent pain that blotted out everything else. So, I wondered, if you were in the most horrible pain imaginable for a very long time, how could you be anyone at all?I could literally forget who I was just by orienting all my awareness outward or by a fullness of pain; an eternity of pain, I decided, would erase me altogether, and there would just be pain. If I couldn't be me forever in the face of that kind of pain, then hell certainly didn't make any sense: Why beat a dead boy? I was greatly relieved. And if God did exist and wanted to collect an immense cavern filled with people so tormented they became nothing but pain, well, fuck him, too. Then I wondered how long you could remain you in heaven as well. Both heaven and hell repulsed me because they both reduced awareness to mere sensation: pain on one hand, pleasure on the other. Hell and Heaven, I decided, belonged not to that soaring awareness I had experienced but with the vulnerable body that created them from fear and desire.It was about that time that I wondered if we had put God at the wrong end of eternity, as a cause rather than a possibility. But I was also reading precociously in science fiction, so...I came to believe that the important thing I had in common with other people was not the species particulars of legs and arms and genitals, but that search light of awareness. Later, I learned that letting "me" slip away was the zen of tennis, the zen of pot throwing, the zen of running down a steep path without falling, the zen of making love...everything.This I was not only slippery, it was also often slow and stupid.Perhaps all possible awareness, rather than awarenesses, is realized; perhaps the space of possible awareness is continuous and complete, while that of possible humans is lumpy and largely irrelevant. Your memories and contingent details create an I, but those fall away the more fully you turn your awareness outward, until there is no difference between I's. Our births don't introduce awareness into the universe, and our deaths don't remove it.Awareness is what is left when you subtract our messy individual instantiations, and perhaps awareness is what the universe does as inevitably as it expands and coalesces into stars and planets and, at least this once, me. But if there is identity between one instance of awareness and others, then awareness is what remains when I don't.Hell, I don't know. I'll go sit by the river tomorrow and let you know how it goes.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

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Real things always push back.
-William James

I have no idea what we're talking about so I'm just going to blowing it out my ... brain.Are you saying that the universe is one complete space-time loaf where everything that has been, is and will be has already been writ? That time is just a matter of where you slice into the loaf and its passage just a function of awareness in successive slicings? A completely deterministic universe without uncertainty and probability? No arrow of time? No entropy?No, in my totally inconsequential opinion your awareness has not alway existed. I will grant you that the probability-space where your awareness could be expressed has always existed (not the awareness itself just the probability), just as the probability-space containing humans or Earth has always existed. In a probabilistic universe, however, these spaces (humans, your awareness, Earth) are not required to be expressed.Given the uncertainties and the vastness of the probability-spaces available to be expressed we are fortunate that these spaces were the ones that were expressed. If they hadn't been then some set of green-eyed frog-fish-mouse thingie on a different planet might be having this discussion in place of us.I have always been a die hard reductionist. In my view your awareness is a function of your consciousness, and your consciousness is a function of the biochemistry of your brain.In this universe, the probability-space for planet Earth got expressed. The probability-space for "human" got expressed. The probability-space for your specific body got expressed and the probability-space for "cavediver" as an aware consciousness (the unique biochemical result) got expressed.If your fetal development had been different some other awareness in the probability-space associated with your body could have been expressed instead of "cavediver." If some other sperm had fertilized that ova then some other body from the probability-space would have been expressed along with some other awareness from the probability-space associated with the biochemistry of that different body.And, yes, even though these spaces have been expressed in some area of space-time there is also a slice in the space-time loaf where the probability-space for "cavediver", the probability-space for your body, the probability-space for human and the probability-space for Earth, no longer exist.As for what it implies ... does it have to imply anything?It just is.Maybe.Edited by AZPaul3, : Almost forgot a "nice" subtitle.

How does this theory hold up against people who are quite literally brain dead, as in, no neurological functions what so ever, no sensory interaction, and thus no actual self-awareness?I've always asked the question of "before," when your dad was a kid and your mom was a kid too. Neither having any idea that they would meet and have a child. For your theory to hold up, it would mean that half of your awareness was in your mom and the other half in your dad (I went with 50-50 to make it easy).Further more, that would mean that your awareness was somewhere in your grandparents too, and their parents and grandparents, and so on.But how? Where even? In the DNA? I don't get how it could be so.Unless your going with the philosophy that we are all one consciousness experiencing life subjectively and there is no difference between your consciousness and mine, they are both the same, we simply have different subjective interaction with our environment. If that's where you're going with this, then allow me a few minutes to take some Psilocybin mushrooms and I'll be with you shortly.- Oni

I took cavediver as saying that his awareness has always existed for him; nor can his awareness ever experience death: his awareness and death cannot ever coexist, nor, for similar reasons, can "before" have any meaning for his awareness.But hey, I drank the orange sunshine kool-aid when a barrel was genuinely a four-way hit, so take that for what's it worth...I'd like my shrooms in a brown paper bag with the dark dung stains that denote freshness.DISCLAIMER: This post is for entertainment purposes only. Any actions posited as committed by me, living or dead, are assuredly fictitious. Any resemblance between the contents of this post and reality are purely coincidental and have no practical value for law enforcement agents. Edited by Omnivorous, : Added standard disclaimer.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

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Real things always push back.
-William James

I could be mistaken, but I don't think that is what cavediver was talking about.I think he is saying that, from the point of view of his awareness, everything that exists only exists as an aspect of his awareness. So when he says "There has never been a time nor will there ever be a time when my awareness does not exist" he is saying that he has no awareness of a time when he had no awareness, and he does not believe that he will ever have an awareness of a time when he has no awareness.It seems to me that cavediver wasn't talking about the past or the future (as we usually conceive of them) but was talking about the peculiar nature of awareness itself.And now a comment about this post. It might seem that I am trying to explain cavediver to you. However, I'm sure he can do that himself. So what I am really doing is saying something about my take on the OP, so that cavediver can tear it to shreds if I got it wrong. That sort of dialog is what is needed when we try to talk about difficult issues for which words do not suffice.

I think you are confusing there being no point where you have 'no existence of your consciousness' with some of the ideas about the universe I've read you posting.The universe contains all points of time (so we can't say what happened one second before T). The analogy (I think) you are positing is that there can be existence only after you awareness 'woke up' and it will end when your awareness 'shuts down' on point of death. As far as you are concerned. Consider the person with profound autism: he/she lives in a world so self centric that the idea of anything 'extra-self' having an independent existence is inconceivable.By the pre-operational phase we become less ego centric in our perceptions of reality and can appreciate that reality exist outside of our existence. But it it is not till we get past the intuitive phases that existence become 'non-magical' and relating to concrete 'laws' of how the world works: that is to say we understand that our mums were alive when we were but a glint in the milkman's eye. You seem to suggest that all possible awareness can exist: but all awarenesses can only exist under conditions where the universe is in its current state (one that could sustain human like awareness) and does not change to a state where it cannot sustain human class awareness.If there is a Goldilocks temporal zone where human awareness can exist it is finite and so all the possible awarenesses cannot be realised.Oops, got go, Hollyoaks is on.Edited by Larni, : si to is

Yeah I re-read it after reading your post and Omni's and more or less figured I went another route in my take on cave's theory/ponderings. *nod*We'll wait for cave to further clarify.- Oni

You have a brain that is modular. None of it is self aware. Different parts take different inputs, operate on them differently and have different outputs. When a decision needs to made, a sort of 'weighting' is carried out.The brain has evolved to ensure the genes get passed on. To do this well, it identifies itself as a single entity, though it is composed of many.This is no different than being able to identify chairs or stars. Death is just one end of "your" "awareness" in the time dimension. Birth is the other."You" is {yes, "is" not "are") a useful fiction created for the purposes of maximising the copying success of your genes. It is easy to think magically when it comes to 'awareness'. I'm wondering why the various configurations self awareness is different enough to warrant these questions...I mean - do you ask these questions over the paramater space for leg confirgurations?

No. The brain has evolved because the genes get passed on.I am not sure why that seems important.