Philosophy Now Forum

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À propos the current article by Michael Shermer in Scientific American: Who are You? Memories, points of view and the self.

Copying your brain's connectome (the diagram of its neural connections) and uploading it to a computer, that wouldn't be a copy of yours, allowing you to survive death. The same as an identical twin isn't a copy of the sibling, even if hypothetically all memories could the same, and thus they share an identical connectome.

Memories, language and senses are not part of the mind, as we have seen before. So David, like a blind person or another one with global aphasia, for instance, have intact unique identities, and copy-paste their connectome as-is wouldn't transfer their unique identity either.

It seems the connectome doesn't contain our unique identity, that is our point of view, our unique eye, something that can't be replicated to allow survival of one's death.

Our unique identity is something that needs be defined and substantiated so that we can solve the duality question.




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Reality is dual - hardware and software, energy and information, brain and mind - intertwined to an an apparent oneness. It is a oneness that is yet to be reconciled by a TOE and accuracy at this stage can only be found by using both relativity and quantum mechanics.

Greta wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2017 7:43 am Reality is dual - hardware and software, energy and information, brain and mind - intertwined to an an apparent oneness. It is a oneness that is yet to be reconciled by a TOE and accuracy at this stage can only be found by using both relativity and quantum mechanics.

When you say "brain and mind - intertwined to an an apparent oneness" I infer that brain, and mind, are all of the points of view that exist. To be clear, by "brain" I mean what an anatomist, including tom dick and harry looking at pictures of brains take to be physical reality. And by "mind" I mean what I have exclusive access to and which I presume others have exclusive access to i.e. memory mostly but with awareness of incoming information too.

However those two , the physical/objective and the mental/subjective are what we know. Is it not possible that besides those two there are also other maybe infinite other paths to reality and all of those as valid as the physical/objective and the mental/subjective? Maybe a theory of everything would be a theory of existence that overarches the hardware and the software to which we have access.

Belinda wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2017 11:08 am

Greta wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2017 7:43 am Reality is dual - hardware and software, energy and information, brain and mind - intertwined to an an apparent oneness. It is a oneness that is yet to be reconciled by a TOE and accuracy at this stage can only be found by using both relativity and quantum mechanics.

When you say "brain and mind - intertwined to an an apparent oneness" I infer that brain, and mind, are all of the points of view that exist. To be clear, by "brain" I mean what an anatomist, including tom dick and harry looking at pictures of brains take to be physical reality. And by "mind" I mean what I have exclusive access to and which I presume others have exclusive access to i.e. memory mostly but with awareness of incoming information too.

However those two , the physical/objective and the mental/subjective are what we know. Is it not possible that besides those two there are also other maybe infinite other paths to reality and all of those as valid as the physical/objective and the mental/subjective? Maybe a theory of everything would be a theory of existence that overarches the hardware and the software to which we have access.

Yes, it seems feasible that if a fundamental connection in physics was made between relativity and QM then it's certainly possible that the concepts might be applicable in equivalent areas. Then again, given how well the predictions of the dual models are, maybe reality simply is dual?

I like the concept and turn of phrase, "memory mostly but with awareness of incoming information too". That covers a fair bit of reality. What is matter but energy that has a physical (apparently not mental) memory of its prior configurations?

A thought experiment: Teleportation, where all of the information of a person is recorded and then reproduced elsewhere. If every single atom and its position in a teleporter's body was recorded sans the quantum information then a nonliving body would be sent. This situation would be suggestive that life and consciousness pertain to quantum information.

daramantus wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2017 6:43 am [...] there is a locus central part of your brain that resides your consciousness and it's in the middle, close to the pineal gland.

Can you substantiate your claim?

Greta wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2017 12:19 am

Your thought experiment is very interesting indeed. However can you sustain it scientifically?

At some point in scientific endeavor and study of the brain comes: the problem of other minds.

PauloL wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2017 9:57 pm

Greta wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2017 12:19 am

Your thought experiment is very interesting indeed. However can you sustain it scientifically?

I'll leave that to the scientists. Logically there will be atoms - the material - and then there is the configuration of atoms.

PauloL wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2017 12:14 am Duality has to do with mind only, as anything else in Nature is physical only.

Duality doesn't exist. Everything in both mind and Nature is nondual (physical and consciousness are one and the same thing).

PauloL wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2017 12:14 am Mind depends on the body, but that doesn't grant that mind is a physical entity beyond any reasonable doubt.

The individual mind doesn't "depend" on the body, it is a part of the body. (Or the body is the extended mind if you will.)
The individual mind is mainly in the head. In the head there is a representation of reality, that's what you see right now. So a part of reality is sort of representing, simulating the whole.
Organisms have evolved this ability to be able to navigate their surroundings.