ruby sparks
Contributor
Based purely upon whether or not it is in your current awareness, you either were or were not the person who experienced being carried away by the pig as a boy?
I would venture to say that whoever I call 'me' at this moment, it was not the same 'me' it was at the time of the pig incident, strictly speaking, because of what I said about self being a fleeting user illusion in flux and not necessarily tied to particular content.
Think of the implications of that. What you consider your experience (and who you consider yourself to be) is entirely a matter of what is being presented to your conscious mind right now, as this. But why must your experiences be presented in the brain of a certain entity, among all those that ever or will live, in order to qualify as yours? Suppose the neurological pattern of that memory could be exactly replicated by a system of electrodes, such that any individual could experience the same phenomenal sensation by wiring up the electrodes to their brain and running the simulation. When that experience is represented in another brain, and is fully realized in just the way you remembered it, doesn't that satisfy every requirement for it to be yours? The only way you could say otherwise would be to claim there is something special about the brain of ruby sparks, wherein a memory summoned within it would qualify as yours, but the same memory summoned within a different brain would not qualify as yours. Is this an accurate interpretation of your position?
At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, I think that is making an unwarranted step, for reasons already given.
There is no reason why, hypothetically, what you say could not happen, and if it did, whatever 'system' was having the experiences would call them 'me' (within certain limits and with the caveats I mentioned). But that does not seem to mean that I am another, just that I could be, or that another system could call itself me (would call 'itself' 'me'). In a nutshell, the experience of self is private and individual to the system having the experiences, even if all systems, hypothetically, would use the same word ('me'). That does not get us, I think, to commonality or universalism of the sort I think you are talking about. It would just mean that being 'me' or to be more precise something calling itself 'me' is relative, subjective, illusory, fleeting, but not universal.
No offence meant, but I think you are repeating thought experiments that you have already used? And I'm still not getting it. Not seeing the step you are. And if I'm honest, when you say stuff like 'that which is having all experiences' I get a bit confused, because it implies that there is something having all experiences, which there very well might be but I don't see how it can be established by argument.