Reverend_Hellh0und

So would you see out of both conciousnesses? or is it one consciousness? how would that work?

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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).

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.
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.

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Lightdemon: "Is 10 going to outer space or something?"
Jerry: "...yes, 10 is going to outerspace."

Happy Days

I think I am who I am based on my experiences on one level, but on my own unique soul on another level. I started out as me, but really became me based on my life experiences. My life experiences could have sent me in one direction, but my unique personality meant that I went the other. Deep!!!

1069

Yeah, that's what I said at first, too (nature and nurture, genetics and life experience, etc), but it seems they're actually talking about something else.
Not "why are you you, why do you have the personality you have and not a different one, etc", but "why can't you see out of other people's eyes? Why is your consciousness attached to your particular cage of flesh, why can't your consciousness be in somebody else's body, why can't somebody else's consciousness be inside of you, etc".
While deeper, this line of thought still doesn't interest me all that much; our "consciousness", our identity, our personality, our id, ego, super-ego, all of it... is wrapped up in that 3-pound gray walnut inside our skulls.
When there are brain transplants, then we'll see out of other people's eyes. We can swap brains (although actually, we'd merely be swapping bodies, since we are our brains). Rich people will live forever- or at least until they die of brain tumors and strokes- by buying new bodies. Beautiful poor people from third-world countries will be selling their bodies, literally, to rich people who prefer them to their own. There'll be a black market trade in bodies for brain transplants, much like the current black market kidney trade.
Brad Pitt will clone himself a million times and sell the clones to rich guys who want to look like him.
And sex reassignment surgery will no longer involve primitive genital reconstruction; those who desire it can merely switch bodies with someone of the opposite gender.

But I don't believe in ensoulment, nor do I believe in consciousness that survives the death of our corporeal bodies, nor do I believe in a collective unconscious, in the sense that Carl Jung meant, if I understand his theories correctly.

A_Wise_Fool

No no im not saying they would share anything, they would just be identical seperate consciousnesses.

The perspectives would be the same up until the point the simulated replica was created. The replica would have all of your memories because it was a replica, but then its perspective would just suddenly pop into the computer simulation. So "it" would feel/perceive like "you" just entered into whatever simulation was created. But "you" would just continue normally.





I don't think we should have the type of consciousness we have now by physics alone, but we do. No one can proove that though.


I believe if a consciousness can disappear eternally, it never existed, as what we define as consciousness, in the first place. If there is no medium to carry on the memories.. then from that perspective it never existed, but we exist now of course...

A_Wise_Fool

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.


Epistemically we cannot know this. It sure seems like everyone is equal but we cannot truly know.




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.

Lightdemon

This discussion reminds me of a old story...I think it was related to a greek mythology fable or something...


A captain of a ship is on a exploration. One of the things that he must have is replacement parts, such as lumber, iron, and tools, so that if his ship is damaged, he will be able to fix it. So in this ship is enough material to build a second ship.

Throughout his explorations, his ship gets damaged. Peices falls off and things break. Little by little the ship loses it's initial form. The peieces are replaced with the ships provisions, and the damaged parts are thrown overboard.

Unbeknownst to the captain, Posiedon (or whatever diety you wish to use) was actually following this ship and picking up all the broken peices. When the captain finally uses all of his repair material, Poseidon creates a ship from the broken peices that were left behind.

The question is this: Which ship is the one that the Captain first sailed off of?


Using this in the discussion of consciousness...
Is it really possible to create a double even when we use the same material, when it is broken apart?

Our brain cells die and are replaced, not as regularly as some other cells, but they do get replaced. If we pick up those brain cells and put them together again, and magically bring them back to life, would we end up with 2 of the same consciousness?

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Republicans are thieves too,
Where's my liberty?
- by Ethereal

Reverend_Hellh0und

and how would one see out of 2 conciousnesses?

Lightdemon

Kind of like this I suppose...

Mach

Consciousness implies singular.

For example, if I had the technology to make a perfect replica of myself.
Doctors knocked me out, updated the copy to be exact at that moment, then woke them both up.

1. There are two distinct minds then, no linkage.

If instead they kill the original me, and wake up the new me.

2. I died. The "new me" is alive, and believes he never died, but in reality I still died, and he is alive. In fact, he was never "alive" before, it just appears to him that it was.

I see no escape from mortality unless it's some sort of transitional movement into a subtrate other than the brain, such that you never really lose functionality. Even then, even given a logical approach to it, I still find it a bit mind-boggling. Probably because the observer is observing their own observation, can't help but get tangled up there.

Then again, how do I know I'm me when I awake every morning and not just a replica with memories transplanted from the former me? I do not...doh!

-Mach

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Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is an illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and I am content.- Conan