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Originally Posted by 1069  Oh, I think I'm beginning to see where y'all are coming from.
Vaguely. I'm grasping it, and then it slips away before it can be articulated.
You don't mean, why am I me from the outside, you mean from the inside.
Why is my particular consciousness attached to my particular body, I guess(?) is what y'all are getting at.
I'm sure this will change in the future, when they can unhook your brain and hook up your consciousness to somebody else's body. Then, yes, I will be able to see through others' eyes, and others will see through mine.
When I was little, I thought that I was the only real person. Even as a teenager, I used to amuse myself and freak myself out with these thoughts. I thought that other people were fake, and they were just put here to test me or trick me or something. My ex-husband had some similar theory; he thought about one out of ten people were real and the rest were some kind of androids or something. Not androids, but worker drones without consciousness or feelings, created by the government or something. He called them epsilons, us betas (an idea he might have gotten from Brave New World). |
Haha interesting. I have also come up with this idea before. I never have actually believed it though. I mentioned earlier that I recently discovered these non-consciousness things are technically, or not so technically, called philosophical-zombies.
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Originally Posted by 1069 But, no; now I know that everyone has the same level of consciousness. Some people are not very good at expressing themselves, but it doesn't mean they don't have feelings or consciousness. |
Epistemically we cannot know this. It sure seems like everyone is equal but we cannot truly know.
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Originally Posted by 1069 Our emotions and our consciousness come mainly from chemicals in our brains; they can be altered or eradicated by the introduction of drugs, or by surgery, or by organic brain disturbances such as a brain tumor or a mental illness, or by brain injury, such as electric shock, massive head trauma, or a stroke.
If (when) scientists figure out a way to hook one brain up to another body, then one's consciousness will shift to another body. Consciousness is in the brain. The process of self-awareness begins at birth and is largely completed by the age of five; one generally has awareness of oneself as an individual, a member of a family, a member of a sex and a race, a member of a neighborhood and a community... all by age five.
Of course it will be continuously tweaked throughout life as new experiences alter one's perceptions.
But consciousness resides in the brain, and can be fairly easily altered or eradicated.
I don't believe it resides anywhere else.
I don't believe in the existence of a soul.
I do not subscribe to Jungian concepts such as collective unconscious or racial memory, though I do believe we are animals and operated purely on instinct like any other animal for hundreds of thousands of years before we stood up on our hind legs and began to cultivate crops. And I believe that some residual instinct remains; feral children have been known to survive for years in the wild. Studies conducted in post-war Europe and the Pacific during the 1940s indicate that abandoned and orphaned children as young as four or five were able to fend quite nicely for themselves on the streets, forming packs for protection and obtaining their own food and shelter. As neither culture routinely taught 20th century toddlers and small children skills that might be of use to them in surviving on the streets, it can only be surmised that these children's primal instincts kicked in when faced with a do-or-die situation.
It's an interesting idea, anyway. |
A typical but very consistent belief.. You seem like you have a good grasp of this so let me ask you something.
You say consciousness is nothing but physical, so therefor it must be completely at the whim of causality, as you say. It can be lost easily by many phiscial occurances or its perception easily altered by drugs or any number of experiences. So you must believe it anything and everything about consciousness can be changesd
If it is absolutely affected by causality then what physical aspect or concept must we change in order to perceive the color red as a COMPLTELY NEW color that we could not possibly have percieved before? Im not saying just switching the cones around inside our eyeballs to change red to green or something that
simple 
.
Im talking about an entirely new color.
At first this seems an epistemic impossibility since we cannot percieve others' consciousness, but if it were changed in the same person then that person could say whether or not red suddenly looked like * __ no description possible__*
** this just reminded me of 'Star Trek III: The Search for Spock' where Spock died and came back from the dead and was asked to describe being dead, he said he couldn't because it was an entirely different sensory perception; like describing color to a blind person.
Anyway, im not really looking for a way to do this but Im more less describing my thoughts and asking whether this is possible or not.
I have a good feeling once we completely disect and understand every aspect of the brain we will not find anything that shows why red from our perspective looks like red and not *__new color__*. There would thus be no causality behind that determined aspect of consciousness, and we would be left with dualism.
Something above and beyond our universe would dictate our perception of color, and for that matter probably every other sense, including consciousness. A god who creates a soul/spirit/whatever fits that nicely.