The "me-ness" of being me

[ruby sparks]

I think you're making the same point as the author. What you're calling scenarios and information he is calling perspective. I think it makes more sense to call it perspective because it is clear that neither case is definitively true while the other is false. Each observer selects the hypothesis that makes what is being observed the most probable, given the information at hand.

I'm ok with him using the word perspective. It seems appropriate. That, in a way, isn't my difficulty at this point.

 

[PyramidHead]

The Awakening Bead Game
"We can very easily combine the bead game with the awakening game. The same urns are used, and with one exception the same conditions obtain. Here is the change: If a non-blue bead has been assigned to a day the player is to be left sleeping that day instead of being awakened to see it.
Imagine you are the player now awakened and seeing a blue bead. Must you not infer both that the urn that was used was full of blue beads and that you are being awakened every day to see one?
(Page 15)

Must you not infer both that the urn that was used was full of blue beads?........yes

....and that you are being awakened every day to see one?....No?

You're on the right track. Keep reading. You're just anticipating his next argument, which goes into why "no" is the correct answer.

 

[ruby sparks]

Brain hurts. Gonna watch a movie now. Something undemanding.

Laters. Hope to revisit this. Finding it fascinating so far.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I also want to reiterate that universalism is not a statement about the number of "selves" so much, because that gives the self a legitimacy as a substance or a spirit. It's less about that and more about what experiences are mine; by extension, any being whose experiences are mine is just me. It's not that there is one "big" consciousness, but rather the enabling conditions for an experience being had by me are less stringent than what is ordinarily proposed.

I'll let Zuboff's words make this a little clearer (this is from a manuscript of an unpublished work that he recently emailed to me):

Let me take a moment to address an occasional objection to universalism that focuses on the role of this claim that the immediacy of experience is universal in all experience. It is easy to agree that being immediate, that being “mine” for somebody or something, is a feature of all experience. The tough, substantive step is seeing that this immediacy, this being “mine” for somebody, is equivalent to being mine for me, so that I am all the “somebodies”. I would not want to be taken to be indulging in an equivocation, whereby the initial easy agreement on the universality of immediacy was disguised as already, in itself, an agreement to the surprising conclusion that all experience is Arnold Zuboff’s. Neither do I want to be seen as making a crazy verbal recommendation, that we just call all possessors of experience “Arnold Zuboff”.

[...]

Bodily continuity and psychological continuity as criteria of personal identity are both fully vulnerable to our critique of the usual, less philosophical view of personhood. Either a body or a mind can divide or be conceived of as changing by degree, but the subject of experience and self-interest cannot. The subject of experience is indivisible and its identity is all or nothing. (Aside from the psychological fission that occurs in brain bisection, there is also a special fusion problem for the proponent of psychological continuity: On his view a person with memory loss could not be identical with the person before the memory loss. Yet it seems that on this same view, if a person after such a memory loss recovers the old memories while retaining memories also of the episode of amnesia, that person would have to be identical with both the person before the loss and the supposedly distinct person after the loss.) And finally, of course, a subject that depended for existence on the narrow specifications for identity of either a bodily or a psychological process must find incredibly unlikely both its own existence and the agreement of its identity conditions with a type that is among the tiny fraction of types that tend to occur in the natural world.

This next bit gets to the model Speakpigeon suggested in his last post.

Advocates of physical or mental criteria of personal identity were really looking for a third thing, which could be imagined as present in either a continuing body or a continuing mind. This third thing, the quality of immediacy, was incapable of division or changing by degree and was inevitable for any experience rather than incredibly improbable for it. Now, the characteristics of indivisibility and all-or-nothing identity, as recognized in the true core of the ordinary view of personhood, have seemed to some philosophers to recommend a simple, indivisible immaterial substance as candidate for the self of personal identity. But this thesis too is vulnerable to both the conceptual and statistical objections to the usual view of personhood. For the appearance in the world and fate of a particular simple substance would be in some way dependent on the physical and mental organism whose self it was. If, for example, an embryo had split, the different identities of the products would have required distinct such simple substances to be assigned to each. In all the possible lines of begettings there would have been countless such possibilities of distinct simple substances, the overwhelming majority, of course, never appearing in the world.

The results of splittings would be as paradoxical as ever if we conceived of them as occurring in association with a simple, indivisible mental substance. Consider how after brain bisection there seem to be two subjects where before there was one. How are these two subjects related to the original simple substance? That original substance would have survived with either hemisphere if a stroke had wiped out the other. But can it now be with both? Can it be with neither? Can it be with only one or the other? And if we imagine gradual changes from, say, your bodily and mental conditions to mine, when does your simple substance disappear in favor of mine? Finally, that those conditions to which your simple substance is attached arose in the world and that you were not instead among the countless possible simple substances that on such a view will never exist must be incredibly improbable for you. So the simple substance thesis must also be rejected.

But perhaps what we need is a compromise between this rejected thesis of many distinct simple substances and universalism. Could we not say that there is but one self and this one self is a simple substance somehow existing equally in all experiences? This universal substance view, however, solves neither the conceptual nor the statistical problems of the usual view. There is in it, in fact, a further, much more obvious conceptual incoherence and a much greater improbability. Merely asserting that one substance is somehow present at once in all experience does not make it understandable how this could be or what it could mean. (By contrast the quality of immediacy is naturally present in all experiential content, as anyone must admit. How all experience could be mine and now if this depended on nothing but this natural quality would be no mystery). And the improbability of your existence must be even greater than in the usual view if it depends on the existence of a simple substance that is somehow the only one allowed to exist. Think of the countless other simple substances, all of which will not make it into the world on such a view. You would have been required to have been luckier on this hypothesis than on any other. (If, however, something in the very logic of experience, the presence in it of an inevitable quality, ensures that any conceivable subject of experience possesses all of experience, then the improbability for a subject that it exists has been therein eliminated.)

And there's nothing in there that looks like the model I suggested with actors haunting humans. There's barely one sentence in the second bit that would be immune from criticism.

For example, Zuboff talks of "substance" and this terminological choice leads to the question of splitting and such. In other words, Zuboff is framing the problem as a physical one to be able to conceive, imagine even, the behaviour of this conscious substance. My model just eschews this difficulty by not committing to any kind of clear-cut physicality. The kind of actors I suggested are entirely abstract except for the only thing that matters here, i.e. the ability to subjectively experience the mental data produced by human brains (and even that is not understood at all as a physical process yet). Actors in my model are not physical so the question of what happens to the actor when the brain splits becomes trivial. As soon as there is no longer one brain but two disconnected bits of brain then you also have two actors. Easy do.

Another example is his discussion of "indivisibility and all-or-nothing identity, as recognized in the true core of the ordinary view of personhood".

Well, me, I don't see identity like that. To me, it's a mental construct and it's much too fuzzy and brittle and uncertain to be able to talk about its "indivisibility", "true core of personhood", etc. Identity in humans is like identity in countries and all things material. It's a construct based on memorised data and current perceptions, feelings, sensations etc. I would therefore certainly expect our sense of identity to dissolve rather ungracefully whenever the brain no longer works properly, which includes for example coma, or states of near coma, and such. I myself experienced such a state and there was no sense of identity at all, except perhaps, as I already explained, a slight anxiety, if that counts as a feature of identity. And nothing else. So, where would be this "indivisibility and all-or-nothing identity, as recognized in the true core of the ordinary view of personhood" Zuboff is talking about?
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

Let me take a moment to address an occasional objection to universalism that focuses on the role of this claim that the immediacy of experience is universal in all experience. It is easy to agree that being immediate, that being “mine” for somebody or something, is a feature of all experience. The tough, substantive step is seeing that this immediacy, this being “mine” for somebody, is equivalent to being mine for me, so that I am all the “somebodies”. I would not want to be taken to be indulging in an equivocation, whereby the initial easy agreement on the universality of immediacy was disguised as already, in itself, an agreement to the surprising conclusion that all experience is Arnold Zuboff’s. Neither do I want to be seen as making a crazy verbal recommendation, that we just call all possessors of experience “Arnold Zuboff”.

[...]

Bodily continuity and psychological continuity as criteria of personal identity are both fully vulnerable to our critique of the usual, less philosophical view of personhood. Either a body or a mind can divide or be conceived of as changing by degree, but the subject of experience and self-interest cannot. The subject of experience is indivisible and its identity is all or nothing. (Aside from the psychological fission that occurs in brain bisection, there is also a special fusion problem for the proponent of psychological continuity: On his view a person with memory loss could not be identical with the person before the memory loss. Yet it seems that on this same view, if a person after such a memory loss recovers the old memories while retaining memories also of the episode of amnesia, that person would have to be identical with both the person before the loss and the supposedly distinct person after the loss.) And finally, of course, a subject that depended for existence on the narrow specifications for identity of either a bodily or a psychological process must find incredibly unlikely both its own existence and the agreement of its identity conditions with a type that is among the tiny fraction of types that tend to occur in the natural world.

Ok I've finished reading the paper. Not all the appendices, though I've perused them (and may return to them another time). I also read this, which you provided (thanks):

https://philarchive.org/archive/ZUBTSO-2

So I have some reservations, can't find my self agreeing with all of it (the first paper by him that you linked to) and perhaps especially with the final paragraphs on pages 43-44, in other words, I suppose, with his final conclusion(s), because I don't think they've been justified. It could of course be that I'm missing something. That he has been so rigorous makes me allow for this.

That said, I feel I did nonetheless come to realise/understand something very, very interesting, dare I say profound*, that I had not appreciated before, that my sense of 'me' is independent of the content of my personal experiences. And slogging through the paper(s) was worth it just for that (new to me) insight alone. Best philosophical paper(s) I've read for ages. Thanks again for starting the thread.

That insight seems to fit very well with my prior beliefs that self is probably an illusion. In fact, if I had to pinpoint where the writer of that paper and I might diverge it would be at these two paragraphs on page 43:

"Notice that I certainly am not saying there is no real I. On the contrary, I am saying that being me, really being me, extends equally to all conscious things."

And so what I am saying has spectacular implications: It means that my self- interest reaches fully into the life of every conscious organism, each of which I equally am, and that the death of any one of these does not annihilate me so long as there still is any other conscious thing anywhere in all reality—since I will be that thing. And every experience in any time is experienced by me with all the same urgency of its happening now. All of it equally is mine and now."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282052756_Time_Self_and_Sleeping_Beauty

Imo, he should better have taken the first option in the first quoted sentence, and say that there is no real I.





* a word I use with trepidation, knowing that the thrill of a new insight can be misplaced and that someone may disabuse me of the notion later.

 

[Speakpigeon]

That insight seems to fit very well with my prior beliefs that self is probably an illusion.

I don't think you could seriously argue that self is an illusion.

There's obviously something illusory about it, which I would say is precisely what Zuboff seems to take to be the "indivisibility and all-or-nothing identity, as recognized in the true core of the ordinary view of personhood".

Self seems to me to be very real but only as a contingent construct that can fall appart very easily, not least as soon as you fall asleep for example, but also when fully conscious but without any, or much, content in your mind, whatever the precise reason. What is illusory is the idea of the continuity of the self through time. We think we're broadly the same person as yesterday. That's illusory, at least to some extent. And the disconnect can be much more pronounced whenever we enter in a deficient mental state. But then, we may no longer be so sure as to who, or even what, we really are.

What we probably all have in common and which is also not an illusion would be what I called "bare consciousness". It would be really surprising if we didn't all have that and in exactly the same way. However, this "bare consciousness", which seems to be what gives us our subjective experience of ourselves when we have a normal access to our mental data. Yet, precisely because we can still be conscious when somehow cut from all or the best part of our mental data, bare consciousness cannot provide a sense of me-ness. Bare consciousness feels like being nothing at all, at least in my experience. A sense of being me requires that I remember at least a few things about myself and feel something, even pain.

The idea of "me" is precisely a way to emphasise what's special about yourself, from your own perspective. It's all premised on the locality of the way the brain works and how human beings relate to each other, almost have to relate to each other inevitably. I don't see how it could make sense to talk of "me" in the sense proposed by Zuboff.

Similarly, I don't think it would make much sense to talk of everywhere as really being here. There's a neat parallel here: Space = bare consciousness; material stuff = mental data. I don't think it would make sense to claim that Place de la Bastille in Paris is also Red Square in Moscow or the Forbidden City in Beijing. That's just meaningless.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

Further thoughts/caveats:

Most of the time, especially when we're fully awake/conscious and not for example under the influence of mind-distorting drugs and so on, our sense of 'me' (self) is usually robust. Other times not so much. It seems to me that the strength of our our sense of ownership of the content of our experiences (presumably we are talking only or at least mainly of the conscious ones) might be positively correlated to the robustness of our sense of self, and thus to our degree of alert consciousness, which varies quite a lot in any given 24-hour period. When I think about it, it seems there might be times when I do not claim strong ownership, times when it's at least a bit hazier. When wakening in the morning sometimes for example, it seems to take a few short moments for 'me' to snap into place as it were, even though there is conscious content during and prior to that.

ETA: as to dreams (while asleep) it seems (seems, especially during recollections of dreams) that there is some 'me-ness', albeit to a lesser degree than while fully awake.

And then there are those who have the distinct feeling that some of the content of their experiences are not them (ie their 'me') at all. I'm thinking perhaps of some Identity Disorders, or schizophrenia. Not exactly sure about other conditions such as dementia.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Yes, I think all of these are good examples as to what it seems we mean by "me".

And we must be all very much aware of that sort of experience.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

What is illusory is the idea of the continuity of the self through time. We think we're broadly the same person as yesterday. That's illusory, at least to some extent. And the disconnect can be much more pronounced whenever we enter in a deficient mental state. But then, we may no longer be so sure as to who, or even what, we really are.

Yes. I agree.

I'm also never sure if it's more correct to say 'illusory' or 'has illusory aspects'. The former is, I think, arguably a good approximation of shorthand for the latter, most of the time. That's what I would say, at any rate.

Also, sorry, I wrote my previous post before reading yours that preceded it, and I see I repeated or echoed some of your other points, about self seeming to be very real but only as a contingent construct that can fall apart very easily. Like a narrative in many ways. A story.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I'm also never sure if it's more correct to say 'illusory' or 'has illusory aspects'. The former is, I think, arguably a good approximation of shorthand for the latter, most of the time. That's what I would say, at any rate.

You will use shorthand at your own peril here.

My take is that since we're having rather philosophically nitpicking conversations, shorthand should be used with care.

Also, sorry, I wrote my previous post before reading yours that preceded it, and I see I repeated or echoed some of your other points, about self seeming to be very real but only as a contingent construct that can fall apart very easily. Like a narrative in many ways. A story.

Yes. And I think science would at least agree with that. And even the study of what I call here "bare consciousness", while maybe more challenging than that of the self, should be possible, at least outside any consideration of the "hard problem" of subjective experience.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

I'm also never sure if it's more correct to say 'illusory' or 'has illusory aspects'. The former is, I think, arguably a good approximation of shorthand for the latter, most of the time. That's what I would say, at any rate.

You will use shorthand at your own peril here.

My take is that since we're having rather philosophically nitpicking conversations, shorthand should be used with care.

Sure.

Imagine a novel, which has a narrator. It's not an illusion that the story has a narrator, it's just that the narrator is not real. Similarly with a desert mirage, there's something out there, but it's an illusion that it's water. Just analogies I know, and a mirage is not exactly the same as an illusion per se.

We experience a sense of self, the experiencing of it is not an illusion (the experience is real) but the self isn't, it isn't what it seems to be. 'Me' is part of a story our brains manufacture and 'I' is the (unreliable) narrator of that story. Or maybe 'I', 'self' and and 'me' are all synonyms. Either way, hard to get one's head around, but there you go. It's also hard to make a case for any alternative.

 

[Speakpigeon]

We experience a sense of self, the experiencing of it is not an illusion (the experience is real) but the self isn't, it isn't what it seems to be. 'Me' is part of a story our brains manufacture and 'I' is the (unreliable) narrator of that story. Or maybe 'I', 'self' and and 'me' are all synonyms. Either way, hard to get one's head around, but there you go. It's also hard to make a case for any alternative.

Yep, I can agree with all that.

But who wouldn't?
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

We experience a sense of self, the experiencing of it is not an illusion (the experience is real) but the self isn't, it isn't what it seems to be. 'Me' is part of a story our brains manufacture and 'I' is the (unreliable) narrator of that story. Or maybe 'I', 'self' and and 'me' are all synonyms. Either way, hard to get one's head around, but there you go. It's also hard to make a case for any alternative.

Yep, I can agree with all that.

But who wouldn't?
EB

Cool.

Also, don't you think it's cool that we might tend to consider 'whatever happens to us' (ie our psychological experiences) as 'me' (or 'happening to me') regardless of the content?

Except that I'm now going to disabuse myself of at least some of what I called the profundity of that by questioning how far it operates or would operate. I suspect that there would come a point, in some hypothetically jumbled experiences, that 'I' would not do that, that my sense of self would, as I think you put it, fall apart, decohere or disintegrate, or at the very least I might question whether something was happening to 'me'. I'd guess that Identity Disorders, schizophrenia and dementia would offer examples of this, but it'd also be my guess that even so-called 'normal/healthy/sane' persons would or could experience it, even if only to a lesser degree. As such, the writer of that paper might be assuming a more robust sense of self than necessarily pertains.

That said, I can't think of a particular case of it happening to 'me'. But then I don't take hallucinogenic drugs.

Nevertheless, I think I'm still ok with the suggestion that our sense of 'me' would have a tendency to persist, even if my/our mental experiences changed quite a lot. In other words, I think 'we' might resist the change to 'not me' as much as our systems would allow, to maintain continuity of the narrative. So if tonight while I'm asleep, someone hypothetically tampered with a tiny but crucial part of my brain so that when I woke tomorrow I was a devout Christian, I might still readily think that it's 'me', all other things being equal, even if it didn't happen gradually or as a result of what I might call conscious deliberation.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I guess the crucial point would be whether you are experiencing contradicting data. You usually remember your own dreams as being yours even though the subject of (probably) all your dreams doesn't actually remember anything about your own self. We still will all say, "I had a dream". Obviously, our brain solves the disconnect between what we remember about ourselves when awake and what we can remember of what went on in a dream by taking all dreams as "unreal". Memory is key, obviously, and the absence of contradictions. Contradictions must make life very difficult for those experiencing them, such as with schizophrenia and hallucinations.

Or for people who find themselves always at loggerhead with other human beings in conversations over the Internet...
EB

 

[PyramidHead]

Let me take a moment to address an occasional objection to universalism that focuses on the role of this claim that the immediacy of experience is universal in all experience. It is easy to agree that being immediate, that being “mine” for somebody or something, is a feature of all experience. The tough, substantive step is seeing that this immediacy, this being “mine” for somebody, is equivalent to being mine for me, so that I am all the “somebodies”. I would not want to be taken to be indulging in an equivocation, whereby the initial easy agreement on the universality of immediacy was disguised as already, in itself, an agreement to the surprising conclusion that all experience is Arnold Zuboff’s. Neither do I want to be seen as making a crazy verbal recommendation, that we just call all possessors of experience “Arnold Zuboff”.

[...]

Bodily continuity and psychological continuity as criteria of personal identity are both fully vulnerable to our critique of the usual, less philosophical view of personhood. Either a body or a mind can divide or be conceived of as changing by degree, but the subject of experience and self-interest cannot. The subject of experience is indivisible and its identity is all or nothing. (Aside from the psychological fission that occurs in brain bisection, there is also a special fusion problem for the proponent of psychological continuity: On his view a person with memory loss could not be identical with the person before the memory loss. Yet it seems that on this same view, if a person after such a memory loss recovers the old memories while retaining memories also of the episode of amnesia, that person would have to be identical with both the person before the loss and the supposedly distinct person after the loss.) And finally, of course, a subject that depended for existence on the narrow specifications for identity of either a bodily or a psychological process must find incredibly unlikely both its own existence and the agreement of its identity conditions with a type that is among the tiny fraction of types that tend to occur in the natural world.

Ok I've finished reading the paper. Not all the appendices, though I've perused them (and may return to them another time). I also read this, which you provided (thanks):

https://philarchive.org/archive/ZUBTSO-2

So I have some reservations, can't find my self agreeing with all of it (the first paper by him that you linked to) and perhaps especially with the final paragraphs on pages 43-44, in other words, I suppose, with his final conclusion(s), because I don't think they've been justified. It could of course be that I'm missing something. That he has been so rigorous makes me allow for this.

That said, I feel I did nonetheless come to realise/understand something very, very interesting, dare I say profound*, that I had not appreciated before, that my sense of 'me' is independent of the content of my personal experiences. And slogging through the paper(s) was worth it just for that (new to me) insight alone. Best philosophical paper(s) I've read for ages. Thanks again for starting the thread.

That insight seems to fit very well with my prior beliefs that self is probably an illusion. In fact, if I had to pinpoint where the writer of that paper and I might diverge it would be at these two paragraphs on page 43:

"Notice that I certainly am not saying there is no real I. On the contrary, I am saying that being me, really being me, extends equally to all conscious things."

And so what I am saying has spectacular implications: It means that my self- interest reaches fully into the life of every conscious organism, each of which I equally am, and that the death of any one of these does not annihilate me so long as there still is any other conscious thing anywhere in all reality—since I will be that thing. And every experience in any time is experienced by me with all the same urgency of its happening now. All of it equally is mine and now."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282052756_Time_Self_and_Sleeping_Beauty

Imo, he should better have taken the first option in the first quoted sentence, and say that there is no real I.





* a word I use with trepidation, knowing that the thrill of a new insight can be misplaced and that someone may disabuse me of the notion later.

Whether or not there is a such thing as an I is immaterial to the argument. If there is no I, and there are only experiences isolated from each other with no metaphysical connection, there is still a very real question to be asked about which experiences are mine, what proportion of them will take place in my consciousness. It seems possible, doesn't it, that in this morass of experiences across space and time, none of them could have been experienced by me, and I could have just never existed. The fact that I do now exist and experience things (even if my presumption of being a stable subject is an illusion) presents a quandary that can only be resolved if all the isolated experiences are happening to me.

That's all I've got. ruby sparks, I highly recommend you at least read the appendix called something like "Intergalactic Monologue for Reader". It's basically a summary of the whole paper from start to finish with more time spend on the brain/identity relationship than all the probability stuff.

 

[ruby sparks]

Whether or not there is a such thing as an I is immaterial to the argument. If there is no I, and there are only experiences isolated from each other with no metaphysical connection, there is still a very real question to be asked about which experiences are mine, what proportion of them will take place in my consciousness. It seems possible, doesn't it, that in this morass of experiences across space and time, none of them could have been experienced by me, and I could have just never existed. The fact that I do now exist and experience things (even if my presumption of being a stable subject is an illusion) presents a quandary that can only be resolved if all the isolated experiences are happening to me.

Thanks. I'm not understanding how this affects what I said.

That's all I've got. ruby sparks, I highly recommend you at least read the appendix called something like "Intergalactic Monologue for Reader". It's basically a summary of the whole paper from start to finish with more time spend on the brain/identity relationship than all the probability stuff.

I've read it again. Still not convinced, sorry.

I think it's the step (from red to blue) in this sentence from page 77 that I'm not going along with. The red is fine, imo, but not the blue. It doesn't appear to necessarily follow:

"So what are you? Your identity cannot be confined by the particularity of any brain or other token or the detail of any experiential content or other type. Therefore, all beings that are, were or will be conscious anywhere and anytime must be you."

Also, I'm not buying some of the probabilistic arguments. From my perspective, yes, it is very improbable that I should exist, but from an objective pov it isn't. Therefore, it seems to me, the problem, the error, is with subjective perspective. It 'fools' me into thinking that something is highly improbable, when it actually isn't.

 

[PyramidHead]

Whether or not there is a such thing as an I is immaterial to the argument. If there is no I, and there are only experiences isolated from each other with no metaphysical connection, there is still a very real question to be asked about which experiences are mine, what proportion of them will take place in my consciousness. It seems possible, doesn't it, that in this morass of experiences across space and time, none of them could have been experienced by me, and I could have just never existed. The fact that I do now exist and experience things (even if my presumption of being a stable subject is an illusion) presents a quandary that can only be resolved if all the isolated experiences are happening to me.

Thanks. I'm not understanding how this affects what I said.

That's all I've got. ruby sparks, I highly recommend you at least read the appendix called something like "Intergalactic Monologue for Reader". It's basically a summary of the whole paper from start to finish with more time spend on the brain/identity relationship than all the probability stuff.

I've read it again. Still not convinced, sorry.

I think it's the step (from red to blue) in this sentence from page 77 that I'm not going along with. The red is fine, imo, but not the blue. It doesn't appear to necessarily follow:

"So what are you? Your identity cannot be confined by the particularity of any brain or other token or the detail of any experiential content or other type. Therefore, all beings that are, were or will be conscious anywhere and anytime must be you."

I don't see how anything else could follow. If you're no particular brain or body, what other possibility is left? Why would you only be some and not others?

Also, I'm not buying some of the probabilistic arguments. From my perspective, yes, it is very improbable that I should exist, but from an objective pov it isn't. Therefore, it seems to me, the problem, the error, is with subjective perspective. It 'fools' me into thinking that something is highly improbable, when it actually isn't.

So, in the example of drawing a blue bead from the urn, you would say there is no possible way you could infer that the urn most likely contained only blue beads rather than just one blue bead? And this is because from the perspective of someone who was only shown blue beads being drawn, your drawing one would not be improbable? That seems very dubious to me.

There is ALWAYS a possible perspective from which an event will appear probable. This does nothing to negate it's improbability from other perspectives. And there is no such thing as an 'objective pov'. All probability depends on perspective and conscious observation filtered through a background of prior knowledge. There are no privileged perspectives in an absolute sense, so the point of hypothesis testing is to find the explanation that relaxes improbability from the most perspectives possible. Otherwise, everything that happens has a 100% chance of occurring from God's perspective so there can be no valid inferences about probability whatsoever. That means no science.

 

[ruby sparks]

I don't see how anything else could follow. If you're no particular brain or body, what other possibility is left? Why would you only be some and not others?

To me, it seems like it's a case of 'not being able to tell the difference' rather than there being no difference.

For example, imagine, using one of his thought experiments, that a body is fully connected up simultaneously to two brains, one of which is registering 'yellow' and the other 'blue'. What does the 'I' in that case experience, red? Blue? green? It doesn't matter, even if the 'I' still feels like 'I' is registering...... whatever colour, because it's perspectival. There are in that case two different brains registering two different colours. An 'I' just can't tell the difference.

So, in the example of drawing a blue bead from the urn, you would say there is no possible way you could infer that the urn most likely contained only blue beads rather than just one blue bead?

In the scenario where I could have seen a non-blue bead, the inference is reasonable that it is improbable that I have not seen a bead from the blue urn.

And this is because from the perspective of someone who was only shown blue beads being drawn, your drawing one would not be improbable? That seems very dubious to me.

If the scenario is one where I am guaranteed to only see a blue bead, then the reasonable inference about the probabilities changes and I can no longer infer that I probably saw a bead taken from the blue urn.

There is ALWAYS a possible perspective from which an event will appear probable. This does nothing to negate it's improbability from other perspectives.

Sure. The perspective has to do with the set up and the information.

Unless we disagree that there's a reality out there which does not depend on perspectives of it, or alternatively if we are only saying that 'from your perspective, all beings must be seem to be you', then....the perspectives are just...perspectives.

And there is no such thing as an 'objective pov'. All probability depends on perspective and conscious observation filtered through a background of prior knowledge. There are no privileged perspectives in an absolute sense, so the point of hypothesis testing is to find the explanation that relaxes improbability from the most perspectives possible. Otherwise, everything that happens has a 100% chance of occurring from God's perspective so there can be no valid inferences about probability whatsoever. That means no science.

Sure, but I am adopting the 'objective pov' possibility hypothetically, as (I think) he is (or 'objective individuation').

Or, if 'objective pov' is the wrong term, it doesn't seem to matter in any case, because it's not so much about an "objective pov" as it is about there being (we assume) a reality out there that does not depend on a subjective perspective of it. We might call this objective reality. Whether or not there's an objective pov from which to view it is arguably a slightly separate matter.

 

[ruby sparks]

I think Zuboff is, essentially, positing some version or other of existence monism, the idea that there is but one 'thing' and every 'thing' which seems distinct is, actually, just a token for (version of) the 'one thing'. This could be taken to apply, objectively, to bananas as much as to (apparently illusory) subjective/perspectival sensations such as 'self'. This, to me (and many others) would be implausible (even before we went as far as Zuboff might have to, and end up saying that one banana is all bananas or even that one banana is all things).

It is also not entirely unplatonic, in the sense that Plato suggested that there is a 'perfect form' (or perfect forms in his slightly different case) of, well, everything, existing in a perfect realm.

Or, less controversially, we could say that Zuboff is putting forward some kind of holism, a 'Gaia' hypothesis for, well, ultimately the universe. Everything.

It is perhaps not ultimately ontologically incorrect to say that my consciousness (whatever it is) is, using a certain approach (such as either of the above) a version of, say, Zuboff's, nor indeed that all things are in some way interconnected, as an overall system (universe). But that does not, imo, get you to saying that they are 'one and the same'. They are arguably not, even if (if) it were the case that if Zuboff's brain were put into my body, either gradually (in a sort of Ship of Theseus process) or suddenly, I would hypothetically still think 'I' was 'me'.

Plus, I'm not sure I would in any case actually think this or that experience was 'me' no matter what the experienced content was (see previous counter examples). I suppose Zuboff might say that in those cases, 'I' am mistaken, that the experiences really are 'me' even if I disown them, but I think the counter examples are nonetheless enough to be a problem for his hypothesis, which at least in part relies on 'me' subjectively calling all my experiences 'me'.

At any rate, in my hypothetical scenario of being connected up to a 'yellow experiencing' brain and a 'blue experiencing' one, my perspective appears to let me down, no matter what colour I experience, because there are, objectively, two distinct, otherwise unconnected (except when temporarily connected to my body) brains, one presumably experiencing yellow and the other blue, and my perspective of the situation is just that, my perspective, what it 'seems' to me (objectively incorrectly).

Zuboff's alternative scenario, about two halves of a brain experiencing on the one hand working and on the other listening to a concert, does not seem to get around this, because again the assumption is that the two halves are afterwards as simultaneously connected as the blue and yellow brain are to my body in my scenario. There then follows (hypothetically) an integrated subjective (arguably in many ways illusory in any case) experience of 'me-ness' which incorporates both. But that is not enough to say "I am my next door neighbour" who went to the concert while I worked. It just means that if his brain (or a duplicate of it) and mine were subsequently merged, mine would experience a certain (mistaken, subjective and illusory) sensation of some mixed sort, and possibly call it 'me', because that's what my brain likes to try to do, to integrate my experiences, in order to better navigate the world. Or for some other reason that has meant I have developed a self.

In the meantime, one might wish to treat all others (and all other things in the universe, conscious or not, because I believe that is where the reasoning would seem to have to take us) 'as if' they were parts of ''oneself', and thus perhaps with compassion, but at the end of the day this would just be a preference. The relative advantages of being either compassionate or not compassionate would still pertain, and do, even without us adopting the (imo implausible) suggestion that I am, universally, all beings.

I'm afraid that at this point, I think Zuboff has, at the end of his arguments, gone off the end of the pier into dangerous, possibly woo waters, and is merely asking us all to 'be nice to each other' because he thinks it would be....nice. I'm all for this, but I think Zuboff's particular route to justifying it is leaky, unfortunately, not least because of (a) his arguments about probability, taken separately from (b) his 'duplicate brain' scenarios, and (c) his distinctions between subjective and objective individuation. I have problems with all three of those.

I say, if it floats your boat, go for it anyway. The world, even the universe, might (might) be a better place if you (we) do. Or it might not. Who knows. It's possible to kill with kindness, especially when it comes to 'nature red in tooth and claw' and all that (ie the 'rules' that govern evolution). But at least you (or I) might feel better about it, and about ourselves. At a pinch, even karma is not an unrelated concept, I think.

Meanwhile, I admit I find it slightly worrying that Zuboff's current project is "Spreading the truth of universalism - the view that every conscious being is you."[/I]
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arnold_Zuboff


Consider me still sceptical, no matter how laudable I think his exhortations might be.

 

[ruby sparks]

Ps

I have some issues also with some aspects of his 'temporal' arguments, about stuff arriving 'the next day' when in at least some of his scenarios it doesn't, functionally. And if it does (objectively) arrive next day and 'I' don't notice, that's again because my perspectival subjectivity is fooled by the 'illusion' and gets it wrong. That said, I agree with him that this effect might mean that I don't know when it arrived and call its arrival 'happening now'.