ryan
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- Jun 26, 2010
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I don't feel applying universalism is very helpful here. It's taking the uniqueness out of the "me" and muddying the definition. There can't be 2 or more me's. "Me" would lose its meaning.Universalism is a hypothesis that answers these and other concerns by simply inverting the priority of experience and experiencer. Rather than an experience being mine because it belongs to a particular thing that is me, a thing is me if it has an experience that is mine. Then, rather than going down the rabbit hole of Ship of Theseus paradoxes and probability calculations, the task is simply to determine how I know an experience is mine. Zuboff suggests that what makes an experience mine is simply its character of 'immediacy', of being presented to me from the inside, in the first-person, tangibly and eminently. All experience everywhere has this characteristic; no matter where it occurs, or which brain generates it, it always contains this quality of immediacy, of being "this, mine, now". Thus all experience is equally mine, and by extension, all organisms with the capacity to have experience have everything it takes to be me.
This hypothesis answers the thought experiment of the two brain hemispheres nicely. During the split, I was fully present in both hemispheres, experiencing both the concert and the studying, although the lack of integration between the two experiences falsely made it appear as though each were the entirety of my experience (this is an important point). When the hemispheres were reunited, my memory of both events clearly indicated to me that they were both experiences of mine--not because of anything to do with the physical constitution of the hemispheres themselves, a particular genetic signature, or any of the other objective features one might stipulate are necessary for a thing to "be me"--but because the experiences had the immediacy and first-person character inherent in all experience. I would clearly remember experiencing the concert from the first-person and suffering through the studying material in the first-person, with no way of sorting which one I experienced first. Both experiences would be mine even if I had replaced one hemisphere with a molecular duplicate composed of different atoms, or a cybernetic version that mimicked the inputs and outputs of the biological version. All it takes for an experience to be mine is for it to be experienced.
I do however like universalism in that you can add onto me, but I don't think we should be splitting "me" while staying consistent.