As I see it, we can't deduce anything from our subjective experience as to our physical ontology or, if you prefer, as to our place in a reality which is itself something we only assume. I can't deduce the reality of anything like the physical world from the phenomenology of my subjective experience.Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2019 8:14 pm If we can't deduce this, are we stuck with inducing our existence as a mere subset of "U"?
Induction, on the other hand, usually leads us to work out a model of the physical world. As an induction, we can't claim we know our model true. We're stuck. Science doesn't seem to be able to help.
So, again, you're back to either there's nothing to say, or else we take our inductive model for granted and accept our self is a property of our body and temporally and spatially limited to it. Which is broadly the rational, i.e. facts + logic, view of the situation. Subjective experience itself is left out of the picture. Science has nothing to say about it. Some scientists are even adamant it's nothing but an illusion. My take is that this is the situation that would be experienced by any cognitive system. It's a self-referential problem: a cognitive system can possibly represent its environment but not itself. There is no representation of the "I". The self is just the functional representation of a fictional person "in the world". That we should pay attention to ourselves in the way we do may be something that slipped through natural selection. We may not survive it for very long.
I think there's no answer to your questions.
EB