The "me-ness" of being me

[ruby sparks]

That's universalism. If there is nothing special about the being that emerges from a set of circumstances with regard to whether or not it's you, you've conceded the point. If you maintain that a bead could have been in the right place, called itself 'me' (as you do), but not been you, then you're stuck again, needing to explain what made that bead you while none of the others would have been, despite them all calling themselves 'me'. And if you were that bead, it would be improbable for you to find yourself in just the spot required to bring you into conscious existence, when there was a much higher chance that another bead would have made it there in your place. If another one did, it would also call itself 'me', but that doesn't help YOUR chances unless you are conceding that YOU WOULD BE THAT BEAD... in which case, like I said, that's universalism.

It doesn't necessarily or likely involve being that bead at all. It only involves it having sensations and calling them 'me'.

That's even temporarily assuming the hypothetical bears out, which it doesn't in a world where people do not always claim their experiences as 'me'.

 

[PyramidHead]

Try this next time you're at the beach or somewhere where's there's sand. Fill a bucket of sand and tip it out. You have just done something which, if you look at it a certain way, is so improbable that the probability (of the exact arrangement of grains) may well be almost incalculable (a trillion to the power of a trillion if there were a trillion grains for example). Some would say that it's therefore so improbable that it couldn't realistically be inferred to be true. And yet the pile of sand is there, every time. And you could do it again every minute for hours, days, months or years on end.

It seems that you no longer understand--or maybe never did--the perspectival nature of probability inferences. What you are describing is just like watching a news story reporting that someone has just won the lottery. Obviously, from that perspective, nothing you are observing needs a special hypothesis in order to be probable. But from the winner's perspective, it should be obvious that he or she will be dumbfounded at their incredible luck, and will perhaps initially think that there was some mistake in the drawing.

Think of it this way: if someone told you your existence depended upon pouring out a bucket of sand and having the grains spontaneously and randomly fall into a pattern that spells your full name, would the fact that you now exist make you infer anything about how likely that hypothesis is?

What if you had an alternate hypothesis, that you would have come into existence regardless of how the sand fell? Would you not consider that to be overwhelmingly more likely to be true, given that you exist? Or would you say (as you seem to be here), "The arrangement of sand particles that spells my full name is just another arrangement of grains, no more probable than any other, so both explanations are evenly matched!"

- - - Updated - - -

That's universalism. If there is nothing special about the being that emerges from a set of circumstances with regard to whether or not it's you, you've conceded the point. If you maintain that a bead could have been in the right place, called itself 'me' (as you do), but not been you, then you're stuck again, needing to explain what made that bead you while none of the others would have been, despite them all calling themselves 'me'. And if you were that bead, it would be improbable for you to find yourself in just the spot required to bring you into conscious existence, when there was a much higher chance that another bead would have made it there in your place. If another one did, it would also call itself 'me', but that doesn't help YOUR chances unless you are conceding that YOU WOULD BE THAT BEAD... in which case, like I said, that's universalism.

It doesn't necessarily or likely involve being that bead at all. It only involves it thinking it's 'me'.

The topic of this thread is personal identity. If you're not interested in whether any particular being is you, then we're no longer talking about the same topic.

 

[ruby sparks]

The topic of this thread is personal identity. If you're not interested in whether any particular being is you, then we're no longer talking about the same topic.

You think you're a fish. What do you know?




By the way, people do not always claim their experiences as 'me' in any case. And this is potentially true of some trout also.

 

[PyramidHead]

The topic of this thread is personal identity. If you're not interested in whether any particular being is you, then we're no longer talking about the same topic.

You think you're a fish. What do you know?




By the way, people do not always claim their experiences as 'me' in any case. And this is potentially true of some trout also.

It really doesn't make a difference what individual people call their experiences, as long as they consider them their experiences.

 

[ruby sparks]

What if you had an alternate hypothesis, that you would have come into existence regardless of how the sand fell?

You keep missing the point. 'I' only come into existence because (temporarily adopting the flawed hypothesis that people always own their experiences) because I tend to call my experiences 'me' (as part of what is probably an illusion). As such, another entity doing the same thing with its experiences is not necessarily part of me.

It really doesn't make a difference what individual people call their experiences, as long as they consider them their experiences.

Ok they sometimes do that, the average human tends to do that, under 'normal' circumstances.

But setting that aside, that it hasn't been shown to even necessarily pertain, even if every entity did tend to do that, then it would be guaranteed to happen, even if all the experiences and consciousnesses are different and unconnected. It isn't even slightly improbable at all that we should find it happening.

By the way, I think you're fudging what this is all meant to be about. The subjective experience of me-ness is one thing, but several of the claims of the universalism you are presenting are more than that. Anyone who can read can see that clearly.

 

[PyramidHead]

You keep missing the point. 'I' only come into existence because (temporarily adopting the flawed hypothesis that people always own their experiences) because I tend to call my experiences 'me' (as part of what is probably an illusion). As such, another entity doing the dame thing with its experiences is not necessarily part of me.

I don't miss the point, it's just not a relevant point. Whether you call your experiences 'me' or 'glurk' or nothing at all, you differentiate between those that happen to you and those that do not. Are some experiences happening to you, while others are not? If so, then all of what I am saying applies; you find yourself at a particular locus of experience with no idea how or why that locus was specifically required for you to have experiences, while another locus wouldn't do. If not, and all experiences happen to you so long as the thing having them calls itself 'me', then you're a universalist. If you don't think any experiences happen to you, I can't help you.

It really doesn't make a difference what individual people call their experiences, as long as they consider them their experiences.

Ok they sometimes do that, the average human tends to do that, under 'normal' circumstances. So what?

No; it's not a tendency, it's a necessity. Experiences can either be mine or not mine, under the ordinary view. If they are mine (which I ascertain based on their feeling immediate and first-person), then I treat them with more care and self-interest than someone else's (which I mistakenly forget are also experienced with the same immediacy that I used to determine which ones were mine!). I'm not talking about words or selves; there are just brains and brain-like systems, no souls, no ghosts in the machine. All that is under scrutiny here is the ineffable quality of being an experiencer, generated as it is by individual brains, and what logically follows if I assume that I have the experiences of at least one of those brains. I think you are getting caught up in the verbiage, thinking there must be a literal 'me' that is smeared across all conscious beings like cream cheese? It's not that. It's just a solution to the problem of how the experiences of each conscious being are associated with (if you insist, the illusion of) being whatever experiences them.

- - - Updated - - -

But setting that aside, that it hasn't been shown to even necessarily pertain, even if every entity did tend to do that, then it would be guaranteed to happen, even if all the experiences and consciousnesses are different and unconnected. It isn't even slightly improbable at all that we should find it happening.

Not from a third-person perspective, no. So? There is more than one perspective at play here, as you keep forgetting. Do you have an answer to my question about the sand spelling your name or not?

 

[ruby sparks]

Think of it this way: if someone told you your existence depended upon pouring out a bucket of sand and having the grains spontaneously and randomly fall into a pattern that spells your full name, would the fact that you now exist make you infer anything about how likely that hypothesis is?

If my existence did depend on such an event then it would be improbable. I honestly don't know what principle you think that is meant to demonstrate. First, it's not even remotely what happens (see previous posts about my adopting ownership of any old pile of sand). Second it wouldn't get you to Universalism anyway. By which I mean the sort of Universalism you are presenting, not this:

...all experiences happen to you so long as the thing having them calls itself 'me', then you're a universalist. If you don't think any experiences happen to you, I can't help you.

Please don't insult my intelligence by being intellectually dishonest, and not for the first time either. It's quite clear that the Universalism you are presenting involves more than just that.

Also, as noted, people don't always call their experiences 'me' in any case.

 

[ruby sparks]

Ok look, maybe I went too far in saying that you were being intellectually dishonest. Apologies. That might not have been the case. Sorry. I was hasty.

I'm fine with the suggestion that my sense of me-ness is to at least some extent independent of my experiences, or that I and most other humans have a tendency to 'own' our consciously-felt and/or other mental experiences, and yes I would call this an illusion in the sense that there are apparently/likely imo illusory aspects to it and to self in general.

That's not the Universalism that Zuboff is (ultimately) on about or that you appeared to me to be on about or leading up to also, during parts of the thread, because it is readily explainable under a 'standard/normal' paradigm, involving psychology for example and the suggestion that my mental experiences are the result of the brain activity inside my skull, by and large (even if I'm asleep and not at that time calling it 'my' skull) and that I am probably not, really, in actual fact, in the real world, sharing a common consciousness with a goat.

And if you only want to say to me that it's metaphysically (whatever that means) possible then I might say that so are leprechauns.

 

[PyramidHead]

If my existence did depend on such an event then it would be improbable.

Exactly. And, necessarily, it is improbable that something improbable has happened, so we should infer that a hypothesis whose predictions make your existence more probable is more probable to be true.

First, it's not even remotely what happens (see previous posts about my adopting ownership of any old pile of sand).

I don't understand what you mean by this. If anything, the chances of all the grains of sand pouring in a pattern that spontaneously spells your full name are actually higher than what had to be true for you to exist under the ordinary view: one sperm out of hundreds of thousands fertilizing a particular egg and no other, in each of the conceptions in your ancestry stretching hundreds of millions of years into the past, where one deviation would have ruined your chances of ever being born. Again, it is true that someone would have been born in your stead had this happened, and that person would use the word 'me' or its equivalent to talk about itself. I can't fathom why you would think this helps YOUR chances in any way. YOU, the consciousness that under the ordinary view is inextricably tied to a specific body and brain, would not be that person calling itself 'me'--unless universalism is true, in which case you would be it and any being that calls itself 'me'.

This is and has always been the universalism that Zuboff and myself have been suggesting. It says nothing about psychology, nothing about the mind/body relationship, nothing about whether or not the persistent self is an illusion, and nothing about a 'shared consciousness' that connects all conscious beings. It starts from the plain fact that I have experiences. You can prove to me beyond a shadow of empirical doubt that the brain is producing a simulated model of reality that is evolved to highlight only the useful features of blah blah blah. Any way you define it, I still have experiences. Some of these I feel right now, with the telltale immediacy and subjective quality of first-person sensation that informs me they are mine, while others are accessible as memories carrying that same quality. I ask: how long have I been having experiences?

One answer is, as long as a particular brain has been receiving input from its environment; only those experiences are mine. This explanation I find lacking. Why did this brain, and no other, have what it took to harbor my experiences? And if only this brain would have sufficed to harbor them, that means my current observation that I have experiences can only be explained by a ridiculously improbable occurrence. Not only that, but it also remains inexplicable why ANY brain could have harbored my experience--why do I even have experiences at all, when it seems that the whole history of space and time could have gone on without my experiencing any of it?

Furthermore, my experiences are all-or-nothing. They are either happening to me or not. If they are happening to me, I experience them in their full immediacy, and if not, they are distant and inaccessible. But the brain can be divided in many ways, both hypothetically and in reality, while still allowing experience to continue. How should I make sense of what happens when the specific brain I am told is the exclusive generator of my experience is no longer a fully integrated whole? Is it not conceivable that different sections could be generating different experiences simultaneously? Which of those experiences would be happening to me, in such a scenario? I can pick out any of the sections in isolation and confirm that by itself, an experience that is represented in each substrate would be my experience, so why should it be any different when multiple substrates are having my experiences?

And, for that matter, what about experiences that were generated in the brain but no longer in my recollection? Those were my experiences when they happened, but if cannot directly summon the first-person quality of them anymore, does that mean they did not happen to me? This question has no satisfactory answer under the view I have been describing. If the experiences harbored in a brain that cannot remember them were still my experiences, then something other than direct access or mental connectedness must define which experiences happened to me. And if experiences happening in non-integrated parts of single brain would still be happening to me, then something other than physical integration of a nervous system must define what experiences are mine.

With these conclusions in hand, I have to reexamine what I have been calling the center of my experiences, this peculiar brain that emerged from a long line of chance events. Without the requirements for direct access and physical integration, there is nothing to restrict my experience to only the ones harbored by this or any one brain. I recall that if that brain were divided down the middle, whatever went on in each hemisphere would be happening to me, experienced by me, even though the experience would be segregated from that of its neighbor due to lack of physical integration. Well, why shouldn't this be the relationship across entire brains, rather than just between hemispheres of a single brain? I recall that not all of the experiences generated by 'my' brain are accessible to it, but those experiences still happened to me and not somebody else. Well, why shouldn't this be true of experiences that happen in other brains, rather than unremembered time-slices of an individual brain? I recall that identifying something as my experience was never an exercise in checking the brain's biology or tracing its history, but an instantaneous recognition of the simple immediacy of subjective impressions presented to consciousness. Well, doesn't all experience, regardless of its access to or integration with other brains, present itself in this way?

Under the weight of this new reasoning, the entire span of my conscious life inflates like a balloon that can no longer contain its contents. What I regard as my experiences (be they user illusions or not) cannot logically be said to have originated and solely remained in a singular alienated clump of neurons. For one thing, the clump isn't even unified with itself on every level, and for another, my experiences being associated with only it would present a deep conundrum of how I managed to have any experiences at all, when so little could have varied and changed the layout and structure of that clump. All along, I must have had all experiences, everywhere, in the brains that were generating them, as those conscious beings. The relationship among brains in isolation from one another is no more of a barrier to my experience than the relationship among pieces of a single brain that are isolated from one another, either in time (due to memory loss) or spatially (due to surgery or illness).

Thus it follows that there is no mystery to why I have experiences, as the requirements for my doing so only relied upon consciousness arising somewhere in the universe. And as long as there are conscious beings in the universe, their experiences will happen to me in the same sense that I had been thinking the experiences of 'my' brain happen to me: in a discontinuous, non-integrated, physical way that presents them to conscious awareness with a direct, immediate urgency. It's not that the particular brain I have been calling mine is now extended to encompass all others; there is just nothing special about it anymore, it's just one perspective out of many that can provide me with experiences, segregated as they must be from one another due to the limitations of physics, but in principle potentially accessible if they were all networked together somehow. In the same way that I feel locked into just the mind that is typing these words, I feel locked into every mind, just as I would feel locked into just part of a single brain if it were cleaved off and kept in a functional state. The sense of being locked in to each one is just another of my experiences, and if not for it, maybe this conclusion would have come intuitively rather than at the end of a chain of inferences.

Note that at no point am I required to claim (a) that all conscious beings are the same in their physical or mental details, (b) that there is a literal 'universal consciousness' that spans them all and enables causal connections among physically isolated nervous systems, (c) that my identity is in any way a substance that exists only 'partially' in each conscious being, (d) that the experiences of one isolated nervous system can be directly felt by another, etc. or any of the ideas that lead to mystical immaterial souls. In fact, the view I started with, that assigned to an inexplicably arbitrary brain a unique and numerically distinct sense of self (something like a "me-ness" of being me) is actually the view that falls into magical thinking. Having discarded it, I can now appreciate that having an experience is a lot like being in a particular place or time, which will always be here and now for whoever is there, and will always be me.

 

[Speakpigeon]

That's universalism. If there is nothing special about the being that emerges from a set of circumstances with regard to whether or not it's you, you've conceded the point. If you maintain that a bead could have been in the right place, called itself 'me' (as you do), but not been you, then you're stuck again, needing to explain what made that bead you while none of the others would have been, despite them all calling themselves 'me'. And if you were that bead, it would be improbable for you to find yourself in just the spot required to bring you into conscious existence, when there was a much higher chance that another bead would have made it there in your place. If another one did, it would also call itself 'me', but that doesn't help YOUR chances unless you are conceding that YOU WOULD BE THAT BEAD... in which case, like I said, that's universalism.

???

I'm me. I'm here.

We're all somewhere. Each place is different from all other places. It is also special and we can tell how it's different and special. And, wherever we are, we all call that somewhere "here".

Now, personally, I fail to see any difference whatsoever with me and everybody else all calling ourselves "me".

I'm me. We're all somebody. Each of us is different from all other people. Each person is also special, and we can tell how we're different and special. And, whoever we are, we all call that somebody "me".

Big deal.

The parallel is in fact rather interesting. And I also fail to see any difference. There's no difference.

Yet, what would be the sense of insisting that we are all in the same place; or that all those different places are somehow identical; or somehow just one thing called "here", or that by being here I'm also everywhere? Do you think you're everywhere where there's somebody? Probably yes, if you're consistent, but not me and not anybody else I know of.

That's just not what we call being "me" and being "here" mean.
EB

 

[Treedbear]

...

It seems that you no longer understand--or maybe never did--the perspectival nature of probability inferences. What you are describing is just like watching a news story reporting that someone has just won the lottery. Obviously, from that perspective, nothing you are observing needs a special hypothesis in order to be probable. But from the winner's perspective, it should be obvious that he or she will be dumbfounded at their incredible luck, and will perhaps initially think that there was some mistake in the drawing.

Think of it this way: if someone told you your existence depended upon pouring out a bucket of sand and having the grains spontaneously and randomly fall into a pattern that spells your full name, would the fact that you now exist make you infer anything about how likely that hypothesis is?

What if you had an alternate hypothesis, that you would have come into existence regardless of how the sand fell? Would you not consider that to be overwhelmingly more likely to be true, given that you exist? Or would you say (as you seem to be here), "The arrangement of sand particles that spells my full name is just another arrangement of grains, no more probable than any other, so both explanations are evenly matched!"
...

That has Anthropic Principle written all over it:

The anthropic principle is a philosophical consideration that observations of the Universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it.
...

The philosophers of cosmology John Earman,[73] Ernan McMullin,[74] and Jesús Mosterín contend that "in its weak version, the anthropic principle is a mere tautology, which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know. In its strong version, it is a gratuitous speculation". A further criticism by Mosterín concerns the flawed "anthropic" inference from the assumption of an infinity of worlds to the existence of one like ours:

The suggestion that an infinity of objects characterized by certain numbers or properties implies the existence among them of objects with any combination of those numbers or characteristics [...] is mistaken. An infinity does not imply at all that any arrangement is present or repeated. [...] The assumption that all possible worlds are realized in an infinite universe is equivalent to the assertion that any infinite set of numbers contains all numbers (or at least all Gödel numbers of the [defining] sequences), which is obviously false.

The only useful meaning for a probability is with regard to future events. Once something occurs it becomes a certainty. Your example of finding one's name spelled out in a random pile of sand is a rather conspicuous way of saying that one exists because it was intended to be so. Up to that point I was at least giving the theory credit for having managed to strip the principle down to basics "which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know."

 

[ruby sparks]

If my existence did depend on such an event then it would be improbable.

Exactly. And, necessarily, it is improbable that something improbable has happened, so we should infer that a hypothesis whose predictions make your existence more probable is more probable to be true.

First, it's not even remotely what happens (see previous posts about my adopting ownership of any old pile of sand).

I don't understand what you mean by this. If anything, the chances of all the grains of sand pouring in a pattern that spontaneously spells your full name are actually higher than what had to be true for you to exist under the ordinary view: one sperm out of hundreds of thousands fertilizing a particular egg and no other, in each of the conceptions in your ancestry stretching hundreds of millions of years into the past, where one deviation would have ruined your chances of ever being born. Again, it is true that someone would have been born in your stead had this happened, and that person would use the word 'me' or its equivalent to talk about itself. I can't fathom why you would think this helps YOUR chances in any way. YOU, the consciousness that under the ordinary view is inextricably tied to a specific body and brain, would not be that person calling itself 'me'--unless universalism is true, in which case you would be it and any being that calls itself 'me'.

This is and has always been the universalism that Zuboff and myself have been suggesting. It says nothing about psychology, nothing about the mind/body relationship, nothing about whether or not the persistent self is an illusion, and nothing about a 'shared consciousness' that connects all conscious beings. It starts from the plain fact that I have experiences. You can prove to me beyond a shadow of empirical doubt that the brain is producing a simulated model of reality that is evolved to highlight only the useful features of blah blah blah. Any way you define it, I still have experiences. Some of these I feel right now, with the telltale immediacy and subjective quality of first-person sensation that informs me they are mine, while others are accessible as memories carrying that same quality. I ask: how long have I been having experiences?

One answer is, as long as a particular brain has been receiving input from its environment; only those experiences are mine. This explanation I find lacking. Why did this brain, and no other, have what it took to harbor my experiences? And if only this brain would have sufficed to harbor them, that means my current observation that I have experiences can only be explained by a ridiculously improbable occurrence. Not only that, but it also remains inexplicable why ANY brain could have harbored my experience--why do I even have experiences at all, when it seems that the whole history of space and time could have gone on without my experiencing any of it?

Furthermore, my experiences are all-or-nothing. They are either happening to me or not. If they are happening to me, I experience them in their full immediacy, and if not, they are distant and inaccessible. But the brain can be divided in many ways, both hypothetically and in reality, while still allowing experience to continue. How should I make sense of what happens when the specific brain I am told is the exclusive generator of my experience is no longer a fully integrated whole? Is it not conceivable that different sections could be generating different experiences simultaneously? Which of those experiences would be happening to me, in such a scenario? I can pick out any of the sections in isolation and confirm that by itself, an experience that is represented in each substrate would be my experience, so why should it be any different when multiple substrates are having my experiences?

And, for that matter, what about experiences that were generated in the brain but no longer in my recollection? Those were my experiences when they happened, but if cannot directly summon the first-person quality of them anymore, does that mean they did not happen to me? This question has no satisfactory answer under the view I have been describing. If the experiences harbored in a brain that cannot remember them were still my experiences, then something other than direct access or mental connectedness must define which experiences happened to me. And if experiences happening in non-integrated parts of single brain would still be happening to me, then something other than physical integration of a nervous system must define what experiences are mine.

With these conclusions in hand, I have to reexamine what I have been calling the center of my experiences, this peculiar brain that emerged from a long line of chance events. Without the requirements for direct access and physical integration, there is nothing to restrict my experience to only the ones harbored by this or any one brain. I recall that if that brain were divided down the middle, whatever went on in each hemisphere would be happening to me, experienced by me, even though the experience would be segregated from that of its neighbor due to lack of physical integration. Well, why shouldn't this be the relationship across entire brains, rather than just between hemispheres of a single brain? I recall that not all of the experiences generated by 'my' brain are accessible to it, but those experiences still happened to me and not somebody else. Well, why shouldn't this be true of experiences that happen in other brains, rather than unremembered time-slices of an individual brain? I recall that identifying something as my experience was never an exercise in checking the brain's biology or tracing its history, but an instantaneous recognition of the simple immediacy of subjective impressions presented to consciousness. Well, doesn't all experience, regardless of its access to or integration with other brains, present itself in this way?

Under the weight of this new reasoning, the entire span of my conscious life inflates like a balloon that can no longer contain its contents. What I regard as my experiences (be they user illusions or not) cannot logically be said to have originated and solely remained in a singular alienated clump of neurons. For one thing, the clump isn't even unified with itself on every level, and for another, my experiences being associated with only it would present a deep conundrum of how I managed to have any experiences at all, when so little could have varied and changed the layout and structure of that clump. All along, I must have had all experiences, everywhere, in the brains that were generating them, as those conscious beings. The relationship among brains in isolation from one another is no more of a barrier to my experience than the relationship among pieces of a single brain that are isolated from one another, either in time (due to memory loss) or spatially (due to surgery or illness).

Thus it follows that there is no mystery to why I have experiences, as the requirements for my doing so only relied upon consciousness arising somewhere in the universe. And as long as there are conscious beings in the universe, their experiences will happen to me in the same sense that I had been thinking the experiences of 'my' brain happen to me: in a discontinuous, non-integrated, physical way that presents them to conscious awareness with a direct, immediate urgency. It's not that the particular brain I have been calling mine is now extended to encompass all others; there is just nothing special about it anymore, it's just one perspective out of many that can provide me with experiences, segregated as they must be from one another due to the limitations of physics, but in principle potentially accessible if they were all networked together somehow. In the same way that I feel locked into just the mind that is typing these words, I feel locked into every mind, just as I would feel locked into just part of a single brain if it were cleaved off and kept in a functional state. The sense of being locked in to each one is just another of my experiences, and if not for it, maybe this conclusion would have come intuitively rather than at the end of a chain of inferences.

Note that at no point am I required to claim (a) that all conscious beings are the same in their physical or mental details, (b) that there is a literal 'universal consciousness' that spans them all and enables causal connections among physically isolated nervous systems, (c) that my identity is in any way a substance that exists only 'partially' in each conscious being, (d) that the experiences of one isolated nervous system can be directly felt by another, etc. or any of the ideas that lead to mystical immaterial souls. In fact, the view I started with, that assigned to an inexplicably arbitrary brain a unique and numerically distinct sense of self (something like a "me-ness" of being me) is actually the view that falls into magical thinking. Having discarded it, I can now appreciate that having an experience is a lot like being in a particular place or time, which will always be here and now for whoever is there, and will always be me.

I could tell you all the parts of that that don't, imo, actually stack up but (a) you haven't said anything new and (b) I'd just be repeating myself. See my previous comments generally and good luck being a fish.

 

[PyramidHead]

...

It seems that you no longer understand--or maybe never did--the perspectival nature of probability inferences. What you are describing is just like watching a news story reporting that someone has just won the lottery. Obviously, from that perspective, nothing you are observing needs a special hypothesis in order to be probable. But from the winner's perspective, it should be obvious that he or she will be dumbfounded at their incredible luck, and will perhaps initially think that there was some mistake in the drawing.

Think of it this way: if someone told you your existence depended upon pouring out a bucket of sand and having the grains spontaneously and randomly fall into a pattern that spells your full name, would the fact that you now exist make you infer anything about how likely that hypothesis is?

What if you had an alternate hypothesis, that you would have come into existence regardless of how the sand fell? Would you not consider that to be overwhelmingly more likely to be true, given that you exist? Or would you say (as you seem to be here), "The arrangement of sand particles that spells my full name is just another arrangement of grains, no more probable than any other, so both explanations are evenly matched!"
...

That has Anthropic Principle written all over it:

The anthropic principle is a philosophical consideration that observations of the Universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it.
...

The philosophers of cosmology John Earman,[73] Ernan McMullin,[74] and Jesús Mosterín contend that "in its weak version, the anthropic principle is a mere tautology, which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know. In its strong version, it is a gratuitous speculation". A further criticism by Mosterín concerns the flawed "anthropic" inference from the assumption of an infinity of worlds to the existence of one like ours:

The suggestion that an infinity of objects characterized by certain numbers or properties implies the existence among them of objects with any combination of those numbers or characteristics [...] is mistaken. An infinity does not imply at all that any arrangement is present or repeated. [...] The assumption that all possible worlds are realized in an infinite universe is equivalent to the assertion that any infinite set of numbers contains all numbers (or at least all Gödel numbers of the [defining] sequences), which is obviously false.

The only useful meaning for a probability is with regard to future events. Once something occurs it becomes a certainty. Your example of finding one's name spelled out in a random pile of sand is a rather conspicuous way of saying that one exists because it was intended to be so. Up to that point I was at least giving the theory credit for having managed to strip the principle down to basics "which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know."

You are mistaken. Probability is perspective-dependent, and has everything to do with what is known to an observer, regardless of when the event took place. You can prove it for yourself: in the thought experiment I mentioned, you would consider it highly unlikely that your existence depended upon the chance arrangement of poured sand grains into your full name, even though that arrangement is no less "objectively" improbable than any other, and even though that event would have taken place before you were born.

In all of science, probability is assigned to past events in order to evaluate hypotheses. A meteor streaks across the sky. One hypothesis, that it broke off a planet in a galaxy billions of light years away and somehow made it all the way here, makes its appearance the result of something highly improbable. Another hypothesis says it came from the local asteroid belt in our own solar system, like most meteors, making its appearance the result of something easy and commonplace. All else being equal, any scientist would place far more confidence in the second explanation, even though the meteor has already arrived and has only one actual origin.

I'm having trouble grasping your point about the anthropic principle. In rejecting a hypothesis that seems too unlikely to be true, universalism favors one that makes the same event (my existence, from my own perspective) more likely. It says nothing about intention or predestination. I can demonstrate this with the same analogy as before. In discarding the hypothesis that the meteor came from somewhere very far away, the scientist does not therefore imply that the meteor was destined to arrive on Earth. She simply infers that, among the options, its originating from a local source in the solar system explains the observation with less improbability than its originating in a faraway galaxy. Would you accuse this scientist of anthropic reasoning about the asteroid? Of course not. Probability inferences do not care what the object of analysis is; given a perspective, an observation, a set of background assumptions, and competing hypotheses, it works the same way for asteroids as it would for the emergence of consciousness in the universe.

 

[PyramidHead]

To hopefully clear something up, let me describe what is actually the landscape of the dispute in this thread. No extra substances or properties are being argued by one side and rejected by the other. Everything that exists in the universe is agreed upon by both sides. The source of disagreement is where to draw the line between "essential to being me" and "accidental to being me". The first category are things that can't be changed without ending my experience of life. The second category can change without getting rid of me.

The ordinary view looks something like this:

Essential to being me
Brain structure and/or patterns that define personality, memory, etc.
DNA inherited from parents
Continuity of psychological attributes
Immediate, first-person consciousness of experience
Integration among all aspects of sensation
Survival of a unique individual organism

Accidental to being me
Clothing, style, facial hair or lack thereof
Make and model of car
Location of apartment or house
Variety of circumstances that may be encountered
Source of food that is consumed

Both sides agree on the existence of all these attributes. What universalism does is argue that the above classification is incorrect for all the reasons I have been talking about (reasoning from thought experiments, probability, counterfactual scenarios, and so on), and the actual classification is this:

Essential to being me
Immediate, first-person consciousness of experience

Accidental to being me
Brain structure and/or patterns that define personality, memory, etc.
DNA inherited from parents
Continuity of psychological attributes
Integration among all aspects of sensation
Survival of a unique individual organism
Clothing, style, facial hair or lack thereof
Make and model of car
Location of apartment or house
Variety of circumstances that may be encountered
Source of food that is consumed

Note that this is not an argument for universalism in itself, it is just a description of the problem. It may seem tempting to think that universalism thus boils down to a word game, but here is why it does not. Zuboff likes to use an example of an alien species that has only ever seen one red object. They mistakenly believe that redness depends on being that exact object. When they are finally convinced by a philosopher that redness can apply to many different objects, the same thing that I am describing here has just happened: the location of the line between "essential to being red" and "accidental to being red" has been moved. Yet, they did not merely learn the proper way to use the word 'red', they learned something new about the world itself, namely the existence of many more red things than they originally had thought. Universalism is saying the same thing about being me, not in a purely linguistic sense, and without positing universal consciousness or a mental substance that covers all conscious beings. I realize you may still disagree with it, but it should not be rejected on empirical grounds, since the empirical data are not in dispute, only the interpretation is.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Whomever I happen to be born as, I will call this somebody "me" and see this somebody as being me. So, calling myself "me" and seeing myself as being me is a certainty. Just as finding yourself somewhere and calling it "here" and seeing it as here.

That's indeed an effect of perspective. And a trivial one. The only things I know for myself are this somebody I call "me" and this place I call "here". It happens to be so and I have zero idea how it could have been different. Being here rather than over there isn't an issue. If I had been over there, I would have called it "here" and thought of it as here. The only meaningful question is how all these places and all these people came to be, and that's a trivially empirical question, one that we probably won't be able to ever answer properly anyway.
EB

 

[PyramidHead]

Whomever I happen to be born as, I will call this somebody "me" and see this somebody as being me. So, calling myself "me" and seeing myself as being me is a certainty. Just as finding yourself somewhere and calling it "here" and seeing it as here.

The qualifier whomever I happen to be born as is a step toward universalism. If you concede that you could have been born as someone else, you're already putting aside the normal view of personal identity, so it's no surprise that the probability argument against that view no longer applies as strongly. It's only when you insist I only could have been born as EB, and if someone else was born instead of EB, it wouldn't be me even if that somebody called himself 'me' that the problem occurs.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Whomever I happen to be born as, I will call this somebody "me" and see this somebody as being me. So, calling myself "me" and seeing myself as being me is a certainty. Just as finding yourself somewhere and calling it "here" and seeing it as here.

The qualifier whomever I happen to be born as is a step toward universalism. If you concede that you could have been born as someone else, you're already putting aside the normal view of personal identity, so it's no surprise that the probability argument against that view no longer applies as strongly. It's only when you insist I only could have been born as EB, and if someone else was born instead of EB, it wouldn't be me even if that somebody called himself 'me' that the problem occurs.

Sure, it's arguably a very simplified model. It's however a good expression of my view about the relationship between what I would call "bare consciousness" and the mind interpreted as a set of data, i.e. perception data, memories, sensations, etc.

Bare consciousness has no identity and it's probably identical, or nearly identical, across the entire population of human beings. Each mind, on the contrary, is probably unique, much like any location on the Earth is unique in its appearance and characteristics. So, our identity has to come from our mental data, just as the identity of a location on Earth comes from its characteristic and appearance and not from anything like its location in absolute space, which would be irrelevant even if it existed because there would be no way to tell the difference between two different locations. So, again, me-ness comes entirely from mental data, and in particular remembered autobiographical data, sensations, and perceptions. And it's not that consciousness finds it somehow convenient to clothe itself in the identity provided by the mind it happens to be conscious of. Consciousness on its own, i.e. bare consciousness, has no identity and no sense of identity because it has no sense. Everything that happens to consciousness is somehow done by the mind. Beyond being conscious of a mind, consciousness has no property. So it's not that consciousness somehow decided to adopt the identity provided by a mind. It's just consciousness being conscious of this identity, passively so to speak. All the hard work is done by the mind. Even the notion of identity is itself a data produced by a mind. So, the notion that there is a very small probability of being yourself is really nonsensical. The probability that some bit of space-time should be where the Eiffel Tower stands is exactly 1, at least given the kind of reality we inhabit.

It's also rather funny that you should now try to argue from "the normal view of personal identity" when you keep disregarding the normal meaning of the word "me". Well, the normal view of personal identity just takes identity for granted and therefore does not see being oneself in the least as improbable. My model is abstract and few people would understand it, but as far as I can tell, it keeps very close to what most people feel about being conscious of themselves as well as being consistent with my own experience.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

What universalism does is argue that the above classification is incorrect for all the reasons I have been talking about (reasoning from thought experiments, probability, counterfactual scenarios, and so on), and the actual classification is this:

Essential to being me
Immediate, first-person consciousness of experience

Accidental to being me
Brain structure and/or patterns that define personality, memory, etc.
DNA inherited from parents
Continuity of psychological attributes
Integration among all aspects of sensation
Survival of a unique individual organism
Clothing, style, facial hair or lack thereof
Make and model of car
Location of apartment or house
Variety of circumstances that may be encountered
Source of food that is consumed

And here is my own take on this:

Essential to being me
All mental data, i.e. current and remembered mental data
Current mental data = perceptions, sensations, impressions, moods, expectations, feelings etc.
Remembered data = biographical data

Accidental to being me
Bare consciousness

Apparently, it's the exact opposite of universalism.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

Brief intermission joke:

Why did the universalist chicken cross the road?





















To get to the same side.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Yeah, well, SCIENCE has a much more comprehensive understanding of this complicated issue:

Harvard University - Department of Physics

https://www.physics.harvard.edu/academics/undergrad/chickenroad

Albert Einstein: The chicken did not cross the road. The road passed beneath the chicken.
Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross roads.
Wolfgang Pauli: There was already a chicken on this side of the road.
Carl Sagan: There are billions and billions of such chickens, crossing roads just like this one, all across the universe. [Apologies for perpetuating the misquote.]
Jean-Dernard-Leon Foucault: What’s interesting is that if you wait a few hours, it will be crossing the road a few inches back that way.
Robert Van de Graaf: Hey, doesn’t it look funny with all its feathers sticking up like that?
Albert Michelson and Edward Morley: Our experiment was a failure. We could not detect the road.
Ludwig Boltzmann: If you have enough chickens, it is a near certainty that one of them will cross the road.
Johannes van der Waals: Some say it was a sixth sense that led the chicken to cross the road. I say it was a sixth power.
David Hilbert: I was standing on the side of the road and a chicken came along, evidently in some kind of strange state. I informed it that it was nevertheless still in my space, so it went across the road.
Blaise Pascal: The chicken felt pressure on this side of the road. However, when it arrived on the other side it still felt the same pressure.
John David Jackson: You’ll find out after you complete this 37-page calculation.
Henri Poincare: Let’s try changing the initial position of the chicken just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit, and….look, it’s now across the road!
Enrico Fermi: In estimating to the nearest power of 10 the number of chickens that cross the road, note that since fractional chickens are not allowed, the desired power must be at least zero. Therefore, at least one chicken crosses the road.
Werner Heisenberg: Because I made darn sure it was standing right next to me on this side.
Richard Feynman, 1: It’s all quite clear from this simple little diagram of a circle with lines poking out of it.
Richard Feynman, 2: There was this good-looking rooster on the other side of the road, and he figured he’d skip all the games and just get to the point. So he asked the chicken if she’d like to come over to his side, and she said sure.
Erwin Schrodinger: The chicken doesn’t cross the road. Rather, it exists simultaneously on both sides…..just don’t peek.
Charles Coulomb: The chicken found a similar chicken on this side of the road to be repellent.
John Bell: Since there are no local hidden chickens, any hidden chickens you find must have come from far away. They therefore surely must have crossed at least one road on their way here.
Henry Cavendish: My dear chicken, I have calculated with the utmost detail and precision the density of your insides. Now, for the sake of my precious sanity, I beg you, stop that incessant clucking and be gone!
Arthur Compton: There were a bunch of chickens waving at me on this side of the road, but then a car came along and they all scattered to the other side. The funny thing is that the ones that ended farthest away were still waving at me a few minutes later. So apparently, the ones that scattered the most had the longest waves.
Hans Geiger: I don’t know, but I say we count how many times it crosses!
Howard Georgi: It can cross all it wants, but I’m going to sit here and wait until it decays.
Edward Teller: I will build a more powerful chicken, and it will cross the road with more energy than any chicken before!
Oskar Klein: Actually, it can get to the other side of the road without crossing it.
Satyendra Bose: An identical chicken already crossed the road, so this one was much more likely to do the same.
Wallace Clement Sabine: If you listen very carefully, you can hear the pitter patter of chicken feet, which implies that a chicken must be crossing the road.
Sir David Brewster: Let me give you my angle on this….
Galileo Galilei: The chicken crossed the road because it put one foot in front of the other and took a sufficient number of steps to traverse a distance greater than or equal to the road’s width. Note that the reason is not because the earth is the center of the universe. Oh, great… another jail term.
David Gross, H. David Politzer, Frank Wilczek: The road is not wide. And at short distances a chicken is free to do whatever it wants.
Robert Millikan: It didn't. It made it part way and then just sort of hovered there, apparently feeling an equal pull in both directions.
Peter Higgs: We must first find the chicken.
Nicolaus Copernicus: The chicken was moving at a slightly different orbital speed around the sun.
Fusion researchers: Because it knew that in 30 years it would get to the other side. [No insult intended here. Well, at least not to the physicists working hard with the meager funds they've been given.]
George Francis FitzGerald: It had its doubts, but after starting across the road, the chicken observed that the distance to the other side didn’t seem quite as large, so it figured it would continue on.
Leo Szilard: First one chicken crossed. This then caused a few more to cross, each of which in turn caused a few more…
George Atwood: The chicken wanted to introduce a setup that would enable it to pose a question and thereby torture future students over and over and over...
Johannes Kepler: I don't know. But I'm glad it did, because as it waddled across, it was kind enough to sweep the area of the road with its wings. And it did so at an astonishingly consistent rate.
Robert Pound and Glen Rebka: It was out for a morning jog and wanted to get its heart rate up by crossing over the crown of the road.
Robert Hooke: At first, the chicken was drawn across the road. But after passing the middle, it felt an increasing desire to return to the original side. It did end up making it to the other side (just barely), but then decided to return. I believe it is still going back and forth on this.
Lisa Randall: The only thing about the chicken we ever discuss is why it crossed the road. There are many more dimensions to it than that!
Norman Ramsey: I don’t know why, but I do know that it took 4.71988362706153 seconds to get there.
Pierre de Fermat: Forget about why. I’ll show you how it can get there in the least amount of time.
Neils Bohr: In attempting to answer the question by observing the chicken, I collapsed its wavefunction to the other side.
Gustav Kirchhoff: It actually crossed the road twice, due to a strange desire to form a closed loop.
Louis de Broglie: Interesting, it always seems to flap its wings an integral number of times before it comes back.
Michael Faraday: No, again? How many times do I have to tell it to stick to the safety of its cage?!
Max Planck: It appears to be a white chicken. Sorry, I deal only with black bodies.
Sir William Hamilton: With regard to the issue of crossing the road, the chicken made it to the other side by taking as little action as possible.
Hugh Everett: I don’t know, but there’s another one over there that isn’t crossing the road.
Edward Witten: 50 years ago, you probably would have said there was no hope of answering this question either.
Archimedes: I was running through the streets yelling and screaming, and it was only afterward that I realized I was carrying a chicken.
Amadeo Avogadro: What, just one? I deal only with very large chicken numbers.
Ptolemy: Someone will probably think of a simpler explanation in a few thousand years, but the present understanding is that the chicken crosses the road because it is constrained to move on this here sphere, which in turn has its center on this one over here. The end result is that, except in the rare case of retrograde chicken motion, the chicken does indeed cross the road.
Marie Curie: Good question. And one that is much less hazardous to one’s health.
Willebrod Snell: I’m not sure, but I did notice that when it stepped onto the road, it changed its direction.
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss: Draw a pillbox around the road, and consider the flux of chickens through the box. If a chicken leaves this side of the road, then assuming that there are no chicken sinks or sources, it must end up on the other side.
Johann Balmer: Why are there only two lines in the middle of the road?
James Clerk Maxwell: Ok, Miss Chicken, let’s figure this out together. Hold out your right foot…. yes, that’s it…. good…. now curl your talons…. right…. now look at your…. hold on – you don’t have any thumbs!
Osborne Reynolds: No idea. But I can see from the ruffled feathers that this was turbulent chicken flow.
Karl Schwarzschild: The sad thing is, I know I could have answered this question too. [This one isn’t meant to be funny.]
Christian Doppler: It always sounds a bit down when it’s heading over there, but rather upbeat when it’s coming back.
Edwin Hubble: Strange, it seems to move faster the farther away it gets.
Ernest Rutherford: The differential cross section for forward chicken scattering is quite large, so the chicken will most likely cross the road if it was initially heading in that direction.
Lene Hau: Well, I wish it hadn't. It cut right in front of me while I was out for a bike ride, chatting it up with a photon.
Stephen Hawking: Chicken fluctuations will inevitably create a scenario where a chicken ends up on the other side of the yellow line, in which case there is a nonzero probability that it will escape to the other side.
Lord Kelvin: I don’t know. But I think the road actually starts back there a bit.
Daniel Bernoulli: Because it enjoyed flying to the other side. Ok, wait, can someone tell me once and for all if I’m relevant to all this flying stuff or not?!
Robert Oppenheimer: Although it was deemed appropriate at the time, people will forever question whether it was correct for the chicken to cross the road

.

Why did you Chicken crossed this very large quote?
EB