PHILSOC DISCUSSION

 

26/11/19

What Isn’t Me? The Self, But Deconstructed

Cake Jar Words: Soul – The Hard Problem – *something nihilistic*

Attendance: 16

 

1. Are you a non-physical entity?
   1. Reductionist self: what parts of us are reducible to other things that we can then define the self? – Descartes’ cogito ergo sum – should we even try to reduce the self? – is life/consciousness even feasibly the result of matter? – is consciousness just an illusion? – but software is written into hardware; could this metaphor apply to matter and consciousness?
   2. To what extent is defining the self dependent upon what others think of you? – there are different senses of ‘you’: essence vs. characteristics – but what even is an essence?
   3. Parfitt’s brain separation thought experiment: separating brain hemispheres, placing them in two separate bodies, are there now two people? Supposed to show that personal identity is nothing over and above brain or body – is this even a useful thought experiment, if biologically implausible? – but what about considering the self as independent of brain – doesn’t this just show that you’ve just split the self, but that there are then two instead?
   4. Is being a self even possible? – characteristics change significantly over time such that at time 1 you might share no characteristics with time 2 – but does change imply no self? There is a link with memories – but doesn’t this mean that you could end up being someone else, if they shared your memories?
   5. Martian teleport example – is the person that comes out you? – can you be completely separate from your self? – what about if you don’t end up being wiped on Earth?
   6. Ship of Theseus example, part by part replacement – distinction between qualitative and quantitative characteristics and identity
   7. Should ‘the self’ be abstract or concrete? – why shouldn’t we consider the self in duality? – the self as the continuity of the sort discoverable in the difference between the continuity of functions of graphed lines as opposed to functions as composed of its points – but, with one of Zeno’s Paradoxes, aren’t the points the abstraction and not the concrete?
2. If your memory is wiped, will you be gone?
   1. You might be you to others, but not to you
3. When do you die?
   1. Physical death?
   2. When there is a break of physical or mental continuity?
   3. When you stop undergoing change? – but what sort of change? – any change to the information that compiles us, descriptive properties – to what extent can we identify with our past selves? In personhood, no change, but in personality, change – what’s personhood? – a historical phenomenon
   4. When our memories are gone?
   5. When our brains cease to function? – but you can bring cells back to life
   6. There is a universal consciousness, so we never die; or, we rejoin the greater consciousness when we die
4. Are we fundamentally separate from other human bodies?
   1. Surely yes…
   2. Universal consciousness, therefore identity seems to just be a front
   3. Acting in self-interest as indicating identity distinctions