is there only one such thing as a you.

So what's really going on?

Moderators: AMod, iMod

Post Reply
jackles
Posts: 1553
Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2013 10:40 pm

is there only one such thing as a you.

Post by jackles »

can it be that there is only one such thing as a you.so all friends and strangers that you meet are underlying the same you.every one you meet has a feeling of a you ..you and me must be the exact same you.does this mean theres only one you and thats me.crikey!
Last edited by jackles on Sun Mar 16, 2014 10:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
hammock
Posts: 232
Joined: Fri Aug 10, 2012 5:21 pm
Location: Heckville, Dorado; Republic of Lostanglia

Re: is there only one such thing as a you.

Post by hammock »

Unlike the particular, concrete instantiations of a developed "somebody", a generic subjectivity isn't noted much for having its own charming personality and voluminous memory. Any base characteristics of consciousness which survive death as other living brains wouldn't really connect to, assimilate, or re-embody the identity information of [a] former personhood[s]. Which is to say, this supposed enduring "you" or underlying "immortality" seems a vacuous bore.
Thomas W Clark wrote: Despite my naturalistic and materialist caveats at the beginning of this essay, such a conclusion may still seem to have a mystical ring. It may seem as though I give too much weight to the subjective sense of always having been present and, in claiming that subjectivity for itself always "is," I ignore the vast times and spaces in which no consciousness exists at all. Nevertheless, I believe a materialist can see that consciousness, as a strictly physical phenomenon instantiated by the brain, creates a world subjectively immune to its own disappearance. It is the very finitude of a self-reflective cognitive system that bars it from witnessing its own beginning or ending and, hence, prevents there being for it any condition other than existing. Its ending is only an event, and its nonexistence a current fact, for other perspectives. After death we won't experience non, being; we won't "fade to black." We continue as the generic subjectivity that always finds itself here, in the various con, texts of awareness that the physical universe manages to create. So when I recommend that you look forward to the (continuing) sense of always having been here, construe that you not as a particular person but as the condition of awareness, which, although manifesting itself in finite subjectivities, nevertheless always finds itself present.

To identify ourselves with generic subjectivity is perhaps as far as the naturalistic materialist can go toward accepting some sort of immortality. It isn't conventional immortality (not even as good as living in others' memory, some might think), since there is no "one" who survives, just the persistence of subjectivity for itself. It might be objected that, in countering the myth of positive nothingness, I go too far in claiming some sort of positive connection between subjectivities, albeit a connection that doesn't preserve the individual. I might be construed as saying (to borrow the language of a different tradition) that an eternal subject exists, ever-present in all contexts of experience. I wouldn't endorse such a construal since it posits an entity above and beyond specific consciousnesses for which there is no evidence; nevertheless, such language captures something of the feel for subjectivity and death which I want to convey.

It is possible that this view may make it easier to cope with the prospect of personal extinction since, if we accept it, we can no longer anticipate being hurled into oblivion to face the eternal blackness that so unsettled Burgess (and, I suspect, secretly bedevils many atheists and agnostics). We may wear our personalities more lightly, seeing ourselves as simply variations on a theme of subjectivity which is in no danger of being extinguished by our passing.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Death%2c+ ... a015922718
jackles
Posts: 1553
Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2013 10:40 pm

Re: is there only one such thing as a you.

Post by jackles »

hmmm.well i think i agree.but the peace in the consciousness is love.
jackles
Posts: 1553
Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2013 10:40 pm

Re: is there only one such thing as a you.

Post by jackles »

well hmmmmock..i think i agree.but the peace in the consciousness is love .gotta be.
User avatar
hammock
Posts: 232
Joined: Fri Aug 10, 2012 5:21 pm
Location: Heckville, Dorado; Republic of Lostanglia

Re: is there only one such thing as a you.

Post by hammock »

jackles wrote:well hmmmmock..i think i agree.but the peace in the consciousness is love .gotta be.
Whatever the precursor property or "potency to __" is that experience emerges from in the context of brain organization, it is certainly universal. Neural tissue isn't composed of exotic matter / energy unique to planet Earth; and biology's and functionalism's disinterest in anything deeper than operating structure hardly dissipates the need of a responsible party [cause] in the general substrate which physics studies.

Also, consciousness in a newborn human (barring defects) soon recovers memory, the capacity to think, and personal desires (the broad template of being a personhood). It just won't be the specific recollections and interests continuing of any one guy or gal who recently acquired long-term residence in Podunk Cemetery. But that basic "what it's like to be somebody" [generic subject] persists as long as the current primates or engineered post-primates of the future survive.
jackles
Posts: 1553
Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2013 10:40 pm

Re: is there only one such thing as a you.

Post by jackles »

hammock can we say how big consciouness is.it is after all capable of containing the whole of a universe.i think my self the brain restricts consciousness to a part of the 4d event.it its self being 5d
User avatar
hammock
Posts: 232
Joined: Fri Aug 10, 2012 5:21 pm
Location: Heckville, Dorado; Republic of Lostanglia

Re: is there only one such thing as a you.

Post by hammock »

jackles wrote:hammock can we say how big consciouness is.it is after all capable of containing the whole of a universe.

Well, for a panpsychist maybe. One of Leibniz's synchronized, windowless monads would contain the whole natural complex folded within it (perhaps the 18th century's premature attempt to grope at holographic properties). I would prefer, instead, to say that a particular mind / observer--anywhere it proceeds--is capable of converting received, transcendent influences into part of the biological organism's sensible exhibition of universe. Thereby it may seem (appearance-wise) as if the entire cosmos is at once manifested everywhere, though always just out of perception around the obscuring "corners" of sight, sound, touch, etc (with distance factoring in as well).
Emily Dickinson wrote:The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain,
With ease, and you, beside.
Post Reply