The "me-ness" of being me

[ryan]

Universalism is a hypothesis that answers these and other concerns by simply inverting the priority of experience and experiencer. Rather than an experience being mine because it belongs to a particular thing that is me, a thing is me if it has an experience that is mine. Then, rather than going down the rabbit hole of Ship of Theseus paradoxes and probability calculations, the task is simply to determine how I know an experience is mine. Zuboff suggests that what makes an experience mine is simply its character of 'immediacy', of being presented to me from the inside, in the first-person, tangibly and eminently. All experience everywhere has this characteristic; no matter where it occurs, or which brain generates it, it always contains this quality of immediacy, of being "this, mine, now". Thus all experience is equally mine, and by extension, all organisms with the capacity to have experience have everything it takes to be me.

This hypothesis answers the thought experiment of the two brain hemispheres nicely. During the split, I was fully present in both hemispheres, experiencing both the concert and the studying, although the lack of integration between the two experiences falsely made it appear as though each were the entirety of my experience (this is an important point). When the hemispheres were reunited, my memory of both events clearly indicated to me that they were both experiences of mine--not because of anything to do with the physical constitution of the hemispheres themselves, a particular genetic signature, or any of the other objective features one might stipulate are necessary for a thing to "be me"--but because the experiences had the immediacy and first-person character inherent in all experience. I would clearly remember experiencing the concert from the first-person and suffering through the studying material in the first-person, with no way of sorting which one I experienced first. Both experiences would be mine even if I had replaced one hemisphere with a molecular duplicate composed of different atoms, or a cybernetic version that mimicked the inputs and outputs of the biological version. All it takes for an experience to be mine is for it to be experienced.

I don't feel applying universalism is very helpful here. It's taking the uniqueness out of the "me" and muddying the definition. There can't be 2 or more me's. "Me" would lose its meaning.

I do however like universalism in that you can add onto me, but I don't think we should be splitting "me" while staying consistent.

 

[PyramidHead]

Consistent with what? The muddled ordinary view that makes your existence virtually impossible it's so unlikely? Universalism, again, is not something that is intended to be 'applied' as a conceptual or linguistic framework, but an actual statement about reality. The whole point is that 'me' is not something uniquely restricted to a single instance of integrated consciousness (like a moment in time or a specific organism in that moment) but is present whenever and wherever the simple quality of immediacy and first-person-ness is experienced.

 

[PyramidHead]

This little cartoon is a good jumping-off point:

 

[ryan]

Consistent with what? The muddled ordinary view that makes your existence virtually impossible it's so unlikely? Universalism, again, is not something that is intended to be 'applied' as a conceptual or linguistic framework, but an actual statement about reality. The whole point is that 'me' is not something uniquely restricted to a single instance of integrated consciousness (like a moment in time or a specific organism in that moment) but is present whenever and wherever the simple quality of immediacy and first-person-ness is experienced.

"Me" is a singular identity. Once you allow 2 me's me becomes something else. There should only be one me.

 

[PyramidHead]

Consistent with what? The muddled ordinary view that makes your existence virtually impossible it's so unlikely? Universalism, again, is not something that is intended to be 'applied' as a conceptual or linguistic framework, but an actual statement about reality. The whole point is that 'me' is not something uniquely restricted to a single instance of integrated consciousness (like a moment in time or a specific organism in that moment) but is present whenever and wherever the simple quality of immediacy and first-person-ness is experienced.

"Me" is a singular identity. Once you allow 2 me's me becomes something else. There should only be one me.

If you can't attack the argument without begging the question in your favor, then I don't see how we can proceed. But for the record, there are not multiple 'me's, just one:

Perhaps the identity of an episode of experience and its subject, like that of a novel and its character, depends merely on a pattern and is therefore indifferent to changes in the particularity of the medium in which the pattern is maintained. And perhaps the particularity felt in experience, the this and here and mine in it, is merely a subjective impression that exists equally well in every occurrence of the pattern of it, like the setting and perspective of a novel.

Just like there is just one novel, even if there are many copies of it (all equally that novel), there is just one me, and all things that have what it takes to be me are equally me.

 

[The AntiChris]

This little cartoon is a good jumping-off point:

But all the consciousness of all the 'other' people in the room and of all conscious beings, anywhere and anytime, has in it the same first person immediacy. So they are all equally you.

I don't see how "same first person immediacy" translates as "equally you". What follows in the cartoon seems to rest on this strange assumption.

 

[ryan]

If you can't attack the argument without begging the question in your favor, then I don't see how we can proceed. But for the record, there are not multiple 'me's, just one:

Perhaps the identity of an episode of experience and its subject, like that of a novel and its character, depends merely on a pattern and is therefore indifferent to changes in the particularity of the medium in which the pattern is maintained. And perhaps the particularity felt in experience, the this and here and mine in it, is merely a subjective impression that exists equally well in every occurrence of the pattern of it, like the setting and perspective of a novel.

Just like there is just one novel, even if there are many copies of it (all equally that novel), there is just one me, and all things that have what it takes to be me are equally me.

My point was directed more towards consciousness.

You said, "'me' is not something uniquely restricted to a single instance of integrated consciousness". I totally disagree, and I will explain why.

Suppose Bob and Mary meet and become married for 10 years. Scientists then divide Bob's left and right brain keeping both halves in his skull. Consciously, Bob is Bob(1) in the morning and Bob(2) in the evening. Bob(2) hits Mary one evening. Bob(1) gets word of this the next day. Bob(1) will not feel accountable because it wasn't him *it wasn't his me*. Bob(1) never had that point of view conscious-wise. But to Mary and the rest of the world, that was still Bob that hit her. Mary tends to think this because she does not have the *unique* and discrete first-person experience that Bob(1) had.

Furthermore, Bob(1) might recall from when he was "total Bob" that he had an urge to hit Mary but always restrained himself.

The point is that *for Bob(1)* there was one "me" in Bob(1). Therefore, if the rest of the world can believe Bob(1)'s claim of a separate "me-ness", then there should be two different "me's" in Bob(total), namely for Bob(1) and Bob(2). There is no longer a Bob(total) me for any point of view.

There is something very important that I want to add to this regarding a universal application, but I will wait to see whether or not you agree with this.

 

[PyramidHead]

This little cartoon is a good jumping-off point:

But all the consciousness of all the 'other' people in the room and of all conscious beings, anywhere and anytime, has in it the same first person immediacy. So they are all equally you.

I don't see how "same first person immediacy" translates as "equally you". What follows in the cartoon seems to rest on this strange assumption.

The point of universalism is that being me is an abstract quality, a type, not a token. The ordinary view states that for an experience to be mine, it must belong to something that is me, in the same way a jacket that is mine belongs to something that is me. That's the wrong way around; what we should say is, in order for something to be me, it must have experiences that are mine. And if we honestly ask what it takes for an experience to be mine, it turns out that it cannot coherently depend on any objective feature of the organism that is undergoing the experience. Thought experiment upon thought experiment has demonstrated that any feature of the physical entity that has the experience can be altered, swapped atom-by-atom with something else, duplicated, chopped up and scattered across time, without giving us a reason to think its experience no longer belongs to it. The only criterion that remains is the simple abstract quality of immediacy that accompanies all experience, the sense of it being here, this, now. Nothing can count as an experience without having that quality. So all experience is thus mine, and all the things that have it are me.

 

[PyramidHead]

If you can't attack the argument without begging the question in your favor, then I don't see how we can proceed. But for the record, there are not multiple 'me's, just one:

Perhaps the identity of an episode of experience and its subject, like that of a novel and its character, depends merely on a pattern and is therefore indifferent to changes in the particularity of the medium in which the pattern is maintained. And perhaps the particularity felt in experience, the this and here and mine in it, is merely a subjective impression that exists equally well in every occurrence of the pattern of it, like the setting and perspective of a novel.

Just like there is just one novel, even if there are many copies of it (all equally that novel), there is just one me, and all things that have what it takes to be me are equally me.

My point was directed more towards consciousness.

You said, "'me' is not something uniquely restricted to a single instance of integrated consciousness". I totally disagree, and I will explain why.

Suppose Bob and Mary meet and become married for 10 years. Scientists then divide Bob's left and right brain keeping both halves in his skull. Consciously, Bob is Bob(1) in the morning and Bob(2) in the evening. Bob(2) hits Mary one evening. Bob(1) gets word of this the next day. Bob(1) will not feel accountable because it wasn't him *it wasn't his me*. Bob(1) never had that point of view conscious-wise.

What you are saying, essentially, is that Bob is like many people who exist and function normally with only one hemisphere of their brain. If the two hemispheres are never active simultaneously in your thought experiment, then he simply goes from being Bob with only the left hemisphere functioning to Bob with only the right hemisphere functioning, with the added detail of forgetting what happened in the adjacent one until its activity is restored. As there is no connection between the hemispheres, this situation is functionally identical to Bob having just his left hemisphere or just his right, and simply forgetting whatever he did in the morning every time evening falls and vice versa. This is not a case of two persons, it is just one person with an extremely odd memory disorder. At no point are there two instances of Bob's consciousness happening at the same time in the same skull, so I don't see why there is any need to divide Bob into two people.

 

[ryan]

My point was directed more towards consciousness.

You said, "'me' is not something uniquely restricted to a single instance of integrated consciousness". I totally disagree, and I will explain why.

Suppose Bob and Mary meet and become married for 10 years. Scientists then divide Bob's left and right brain keeping both halves in his skull. Consciously, Bob is Bob(1) in the morning and Bob(2) in the evening. Bob(2) hits Mary one evening. Bob(1) gets word of this the next day. Bob(1) will not feel accountable because it wasn't him *it wasn't his me*. Bob(1) never had that point of view conscious-wise.

What you are saying, essentially, is that Bob is like many people who exist and function normally with only one hemisphere of their brain. If the two hemispheres are never active simultaneously in your thought experiment, then he simply goes from being Bob with only the left hemisphere functioning to Bob with only the right hemisphere functioning, with the added detail of forgetting what happened in the adjacent one until its activity is restored. As there is no connection between the hemispheres, this situation is functionally identical to Bob having just his left hemisphere or just his right, and simply forgetting whatever he did in the morning every time evening falls and vice versa. This is not a case of two persons, it is just one person with an extremely odd memory disorder. At no point are there two instances of Bob's consciousness happening at the same time in the same skull, so I don't see why there is any need to divide Bob into two people.

I disagree. Would you say that I am you without the memories?

 

[PyramidHead]

My point was directed more towards consciousness.

You said, "'me' is not something uniquely restricted to a single instance of integrated consciousness". I totally disagree, and I will explain why.

Suppose Bob and Mary meet and become married for 10 years. Scientists then divide Bob's left and right brain keeping both halves in his skull. Consciously, Bob is Bob(1) in the morning and Bob(2) in the evening. Bob(2) hits Mary one evening. Bob(1) gets word of this the next day. Bob(1) will not feel accountable because it wasn't him *it wasn't his me*. Bob(1) never had that point of view conscious-wise.

What you are saying, essentially, is that Bob is like many people who exist and function normally with only one hemisphere of their brain. If the two hemispheres are never active simultaneously in your thought experiment, then he simply goes from being Bob with only the left hemisphere functioning to Bob with only the right hemisphere functioning, with the added detail of forgetting what happened in the adjacent one until its activity is restored. As there is no connection between the hemispheres, this situation is functionally identical to Bob having just his left hemisphere or just his right, and simply forgetting whatever he did in the morning every time evening falls and vice versa. This is not a case of two persons, it is just one person with an extremely odd memory disorder. At no point are there two instances of Bob's consciousness happening at the same time in the same skull, so I don't see why there is any need to divide Bob into two people.

I disagree. Would you say that I am you without the memories?

Of course, that's the whole point. You are everyone and everything that is conscious, the content doesn't matter. Everything that has experiences that belong to you is you. Experiences that belong to you are just those that are experienced as immediate and first-person, even if they are not physically integrated with every other experience you have, and that includes all possible experience.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I disagree. Would you say that I am you without the memories?

Of course, that's the whole point. You are everyone and everything that is conscious, the content doesn't matter. Everything that has experiences that belong to you is you. Experiences that belong to you are just those that are experienced as immediate and first-person, even if they are not physically integrated with every other experience you have, and that includes all possible experience.

Your insistance on the "me-ness" idea I think makes your task unnecessarily complicated.

I think you should try to make your point about bare consciousness being the same for all of us without peddling the stuff as a "me", which doesn't seem essential here. The result would be the same without the "me" thing.

Personally, I accept the idea that our subjective experience is essentially bare consciousness and that we probably all have essentially the same one, although whether it's one thing for all of us or different instances of the same things, I wouldn't dare to presume I could possibly know.

It seems my only disagreement with you is about the me idea and whether the "me" refers to the self or to the experience in itself, i.e. bare consciousness.

Just try it. I think it would make things a lot easier.
EB

 

[PyramidHead]

I disagree. Would you say that I am you without the memories?

Of course, that's the whole point. You are everyone and everything that is conscious, the content doesn't matter. Everything that has experiences that belong to you is you. Experiences that belong to you are just those that are experienced as immediate and first-person, even if they are not physically integrated with every other experience you have, and that includes all possible experience.

Your insistance on the "me-ness" idea I think makes your task unnecessarily complicated.

I think you should try to make your point about bare consciousness being the same for all of us without peddling the stuff as a "me", which doesn't seem essential here. The result would be the same without the "me" thing.

Personally, I accept the idea that our subjective experience is essentially bare consciousness and that we probably all have essentially the same one, although whether it's one thing for all of us or different instances of the same things, I wouldn't dare to presume I could possibly know.

It seems my only disagreement with you is about the me idea and whether the "me" refers to the self or to the experience in itself, i.e. bare consciousness.

Just try it. I think it would make things a lot easier.
EB

I actually don't think there is any such thing as a bare consciousness, though I'm open to being convinced, so I doubt that would be the right route for me. All consciousness has content.

 

[Juma]

My point was directed more towards consciousness.

You said, "'me' is not something uniquely restricted to a single instance of integrated consciousness". I totally disagree, and I will explain why.

Suppose Bob and Mary meet and become married for 10 years. Scientists then divide Bob's left and right brain keeping both halves in his skull. Consciously, Bob is Bob(1) in the morning and Bob(2) in the evening. Bob(2) hits Mary one evening. Bob(1) gets word of this the next day. Bob(1) will not feel accountable because it wasn't him *it wasn't his me*. Bob(1) never had that point of view conscious-wise.

What you are saying, essentially, is that Bob is like many people who exist and function normally with only one hemisphere of their brain. If the two hemispheres are never active simultaneously in your thought experiment, then he simply goes from being Bob with only the left hemisphere functioning to Bob with only the right hemisphere functioning, with the added detail of forgetting what happened in the adjacent one until its activity is restored. As there is no connection between the hemispheres, this situation is functionally identical to Bob having just his left hemisphere or just his right, and simply forgetting whatever he did in the morning every time evening falls and vice versa. This is not a case of two persons, it is just one person with an extremely odd memory disorder. At no point are there two instances of Bob's consciousness happening at the same time in the same skull, so I don't see why there is any need to divide Bob into two people.

I disagree. Would you say that I am you without the memories?

You are you’re memories and special wiring of your brain.

 

[ryan]

I disagree. Would you say that I am you without the memories?

Of course, that's the whole point. You are everyone and everything that is conscious, the content doesn't matter. Everything that has experiences that belong to you is you. Experiences that belong to you are just those that are experienced as immediate and first-person, even if they are not physically integrated with every other experience you have, and that includes all possible experience.

Okay, so you, and presumably the cartoon, seem to argue that there only needs to be one me for everybody. Is that an accurate implication?

If so, then there is still a sense of me that is not you in the present without the use of memories (assuming the present is what we think it is). If this consciousness were truly universal, I should have a simultaneous present experience of multiple consciousnesses, not just one. In other words, I should feel (me should feel) not quite omniscient but rather "multiscient" (for lack of a real term, lol) but more than just a singular subjectivity.

 

[ryan]

I disagree. Would you say that I am you without the memories?

You are you’re memories and special wiring of your brain.

But what do the memories and special wiring belong to? What is it that claims its memories and brain?

 

[ryan]

PyramidHead, one more thing, why is it that I have access to only part of "me"? And what is "I" in the last sentence even referring to if it is not referring to me?

 

[Elixir]

PyramidHead, one more thing, why is it that I have access to only part of "me"?

I'm guessing it's the security firewall.

 

[PyramidHead]

I disagree. Would you say that I am you without the memories?

Of course, that's the whole point. You are everyone and everything that is conscious, the content doesn't matter. Everything that has experiences that belong to you is you. Experiences that belong to you are just those that are experienced as immediate and first-person, even if they are not physically integrated with every other experience you have, and that includes all possible experience.

Okay, so you, and presumably the cartoon, seem to argue that there only needs to be one me for everybody. Is that an accurate implication?

If so, then there is still a sense of me that is not you in the present without the use of memories (assuming the present is what we think it is). If this consciousness were truly universal, I should have a simultaneous present experience of multiple consciousnesses, not just one. In other words, I should feel (me should feel) not quite omniscient but rather "multiscient" (for lack of a real term, lol) but more than just a singular subjectivity.

Why? Even under the ordinary view of things, you do not have direct access to all of the experiential states you consider yours. If you get very drunk and do something stupid at a party but don't remember it the next day, you still feel guilty about it even though you have neither the memory nor the immediate sensation of what your past self did. And in all the examples of brain bisection, the right hemisphere and left hemisphere have independent experiences even though they are both the experiences of the same person. What I am suggesting is to take these implications to their logical conclusion, namely that something can be you even if its experiences are not integrated within a single boundary. Just as you would rightly say that you did perform some stupid stunt while you were drunk, you can use the same reasoning to say you do experience what is happening in multiple brains--but from the perspective of each one, you only have access to its integrated content.

 

[PyramidHead]

PyramidHead, one more thing, why is it that I have access to only part of "me"? And what is "I" in the last sentence even referring to if it is not referring to me?

Access, or integration, is a physical phenomenon. Information can only travel through time and space if the channels are there to enable such communication. But even assuming I am wrong, and you are just Ryan, you (Ryan) STILL only have access to part of you: the part that you consider to be happening right now. Your only access to other parts, including those that you are not even aware of right now (such as the fact that 2x3=6) is through memory recall, which still takes place in your immediate experience as a sensation, a first-person perception. And even that access is not perfect or complete by any means. Yet, you have no trouble calling even the parts that are missing yours, so long as you can be reasonably certain they were experienced in the immediate and internal way that characterizes all your experiences. So, this notion that in order for something to be you, all of its experiential ingredients must be at your fingertips all the time, is flawed and incoherent from the start.


There are only moments of experience taking place in different substrates, at different times, in different places. No criteria related to the objective identity of any brain, its physical composition, or its DNA are sufficient to establish which of these moments of experience belong to you. The only quality that you can use to make this designation is the actual first-person nature of your experience, even if you cannot magically summon that quality across physical barriers at an instant's notice. You must conclude, then, that since all experience is presented in this first-person and immediate way (having dispensed with any notion that the substrate, time, or place of its occurrence is a relevant factor), all experience is happening to you.