What the hell are human beings anyway?

[Anonymous No.11433720]

We have the concept of self continuity throughout our lives and believe that even though our bodies change, "we" remain their, locked inside of our bony cages. Why don't we challenge that belief today.

There is nothing about you that is not there in another human being or the environment. You are the bags of groceries that you've been eating all your life and now those bags have an identity associated with it? How preposterous is that idea? Can vegetables and amino acids really think that they need to go to work tomorrow at 9 A.M.

In my quest to understand what uniquely identifies persons, I found that there is nothing that is not reproducible except consciousness that you are in that body. Even if you had an identical twin, raised in the same conditions, your consciousness still remains isolated from your twin's and doesn't just float between the two bodies like physicalism would logically dictate. If consciousness is a pure function of physical matter, then twins should have the best chance of jumping bodies.

What else remains unique? Well the wavefunction in that space. You are N number of particles entangled with the environment and your consciousness is at the centre of this wavefunction probability space, observing. Observation shouldn't have been possible in the first place. As a person your identity just becomes the unique set of eigenvalues given a certain measurement. Those eigenvalues remain unique to you as a quantum system. But why should a consciousness emerge out of that? There seems to me no purpose for consciousness. A human system could perfectly interact with his surroundings dictated by the random outcome of quantum measurements. The question of self-identity, quantum entanglement, and consciousness then come under one single umbrella: what the hell is anything at all and why is it conscious in things that look like humans?

[Anonymous No.11433722]

>generic reductionism
YAAAAAAAWN

[Anonymous No.11433727]

>>11433720
>we are just star stuff

[Anonymous No.11433758]

>>11433720
>wavefuntion
>eigenvalues
>quantum entanglement
I guarantee that you don't actually know what those actually are, OP.

[Anonymous No.11433790]

>>11433720
Human beings are a species of super smart apes

[Anonymous No.11433795]

>>11433727
>HUMANS ARE THE PURVEYORS OF SOUL
>THERE EXISTS AN AFTERLIFE
>SCIENCE DOESN'T TELL YOU ABOUT THE LOVE DIMENSION

[Anonymous No.11433801]

>>11433758
I guarantee that you don't know about it either.

[Elder NPC No.11433803]

>>11433720
Humans are the things that agree that they are the weight beneath their feet/posterior (the contact point between their entity and that which exerts resistance against).

I just call them pleasure vessels because further reduction makes having a wank mighty hard.

[Anonymous No.11433806]

>>11433720
Soul.

[Anonymous No.11433878]

>>11433720
>Even if you had an identical twin, raised in the same conditions, your consciousness still remains isolated from your twin's and doesn't just float between the two bodies like physicalism would logically dictate.
What about physicalism indicates that there should be some kind of telepathic transfer of information between the twins?

[Anonymous No.11433910]

emergent property of heat dissipation

[Anonymous No.11433918]

>>11433720
>Even if you had an identical twin, raised in the same conditions, your consciousness still remains isolated from your twin's and doesn't just float between the two bodies like physicalism would logically dictate.

Why the fuck do you think physicalism would indicate this?

[Anonymous No.11433920]

>>11433795
>WHY IS THERE SOMETHING INSTEAD OF NOTHING?
>YOU EVER THINK ABOUT HOW LOW THE PROBABILITY WAS OF YOUR EXISTENCE?
>WE'RE ON A BALL HURTLING THROUGH SPACE

[Anonymous No.11433928]

>>11433806
What is a soul? Where is it? How much does it weigh?

[Anonymous No.11433950]

>>11433720
You are not yourself
Simple as that
Who you were 3 years ago is completely different from who you are right now is completely different from who you will be 3 years from now
Why? Experiences. The concept of "you" is a shard in relation to other shards of "you"s with respect to time
It's not crazy to think that this also means that who you were 3 seconds ago is completely different from who you are right now is completely different from who you will be 3 seconds from now
tl;dr: you are not yourself and the idea of yourself is as bullshit as having a drop from a bowl of soup and calling that drop the entire soup

[Anonymous No.11433956]

>>11433720
>In my quest to understand what uniquely identifies persons, I found that there is nothing that is not reproducible except consciousness that you are in that body.
define "consciousness"

[Anonymous No.11433963]

Regarding the twins thing, if you were to have two twins who think the same, look the same, in fact, just are the same in general then yeah if that were to continue they'd more or less be the same person with the same cognition. Consciousness is a function of your brain and if you have two completely identical brains they're the same thing.
You, however, seem to lack consciousness. You are a massive cocksucking retard and you should go back to >>>/x/

[Anonymous No.11433970]

>>11433963
They’re not the same because they’re in different places in the world, dummy.

[Anonymous No.11434099]

>>11433950
That is the physicalist dream. They want to preserve self identity while allowing for themselves to be materially changed over time. The problem for the M isn't over there; His claim is that his identity is the pattern of matter that is him. Oh really??? Are you the same pattern now as you were 3 decades ago fat fuck.

[Anonymous No.11434109]

>>11433963
Why dont you suck my cock and tell me what's wrong with the argument. Just admit it you don't know the answer because you are a coomer brain dead fgt who can't even solve a 2nd order differential equation without googling. If physicalism is true, then tell me why is the sense of "me"-ness confined to only one of the twins. why not both? If consciousness is a function of matter, I should be in both of their bodies.

Here's another exp. while you are sleeping I blend you up, and then rearrange your particles in exactly the same way but I make two copies of them while im at it. Which one of them is "you", which body do you wake up in? Do you simply die? You cannot die because your body has been reconstructed. You cannot wake up in two bodies. Why? Because your fucking dogma is inconsistent you shit loving idiot.

[Anonymous No.11434165]

>>11433956
Consciousness is the fundamental data of epistemology. When something "knows" we call it conscious. A computer playing chess doesn't know about chess as a game. It knows about the database it's picking information from and it knows about the rules of the game coded. It knows something therefore it is somewhat conscious. Insects on the other hand know about environments, predators, temperatures, and genes make them aware of mates. Therefore they are more conscious. You know that you are something. You are person. Therefore you are conscious like a human is expected, meaning in other words: you possess all the info that entails with being a modern human. You are more conscious than your ancestors who were only aware of lesser things than you are today.

If you are knowing, you are conscious. Matter alone doesn't have the property of knowledge, except it does in some rudimentary sense through sensing force fields.

[Anonymous No.11434170]

>>11434109
>If physicalism is true, then tell me why is the sense of "me"-ness confined to only one of the twins. why not both? If consciousness is a function of matter, I should be in both of their bodies.
Not that guy but: Both have their own sense of me-ness because no matter how similar they are they have still differences. There are signals that enter the brain of one twin that don't enter the brain of the other. Why should there be some conscious mind that experiences both of their mental states simultaneously? Assuming that is what would go against physicalism.

[Anonymous No.11434257]

>>11434170
That's not the point of the argument. The point of the argument is to show that when you clone a person or have twins, then there are two of something: namely consciousnesses which have the surprising property of belonging to first person ontology. Arguing that there are two people hence two digestive processes is still understandable: of course there are two guts so this system can digest twice the food. Not with consciousness. Put yourself in the shoes of one of those twins. Then question, what is that property which makes you, you. What identifies you with that body and not with the other body? This problem is intractable if you only consider a universe with objects that are in the third person. If you do accept a universe which has only third person ontology, then that universe cannot necessarily support first person consciousness. It can support very intelligent humans and civilizations, but not conscious feeling. The taste of vanilla for example. It's a complex neurobiological phenomenon, but in a matter dominated universe, it makes no sense why something like "taste" should exist. Is taste a particle? NO. A color? Nope, colors are subjective. A crystal ball - a material structure like a building: this gets interesting: so every person tasting vanilla should have a crystal ball pop in their head (read: neural circuit ) and this should be objectively measurable. But after measurement what you are left with is a reading on a chart. A photograph. Information that describes the event. But to the person tasting it, it "felt" like something. In a material universe, the word "felt" should be illegal because it is not properly defined, especially by their advocates.

[Anonymous No.11434268]

>>11434257
>muh qualia

[Anonymous No.11434278]

>>11434170
>>11434257

The point is to show that events in the universe have one more real attribute to them and that is "feels". I don't care if you cringe at that word but I'm just not buying into the dogmatic view held by physicalists. "feels" is a property then just like mass, charge etc. Think about it. Your V4 supports color vision yet disrupting V4 magnetically, will cause you to lose consciousness of color. It's easy to say V4 caused color processing. But what is the effect? Physicalists don't define the effect of the thing that V4 causes it to be, here color vision. "color" is a word not defined in physics. Only wavelengths are. Wavelength processing and differentiation is controlled by V4 but when you disrupt it, you cannot see color. What sees the color? Why is color even a thing? If color is just a set of points in a 3D graph that make a structure when they are stimulated by the corresponding wavelength, then again, we've missed out on explaining what is the thing that is the color. Is color the set of points? Doesn't seem like so to me.

[Anonymous No.11434285]

>>11433790
Apes are super smart dirt.

[Anonymous No.11434291]

>>11434285
Dirt is conscious?

[Anonymous No.11434318]

>>11434257
>Put yourself in the shoes of one of those twins. Then question, what is that property which makes you, you. What identifies you with that body and not with the other body?
You don't need twins or clones for this apparent dilemma. In general you could ask: what is it that makes me this particular person rather than any random person? Supposedly my consciousness is on equal grounds with the consciousness of other people. Yet I feel only one of them. Only one of all minds feels real to me. It doesn't seem even coherent to imagine experiencing all minds simultaneously, yet if all minds are equally real isn't that what we should expect? If you feel like there must be some matter of fact and something that determines who *you* will become in these mind-splitting thought experiments, I don't understand why you stop there and aren't compelled to become an outright solipsist.

But to me these questions are a bit like "Why is *now* this particular moment rather than other? Why is it the year 2020 rather than 1748?" The present moment feels special but there's no reason why it's this moment rather than another.

[Anonymous No.11434426]

>>11434318
If you are a solipsist and you come to me saying that, I will immediately refute your solipsism by my solipsism. The whole point you bring up is the next step of the thought experiment. It seems to suggest that you either accept a logical discrepancy or posit something that is radically different than mainstream thought, a copernican revolution. Materialism has logical blackholes, therefore it must be abandoned as a complete theory.

[Anonymous No.11434431]

>>11433928
>soul weighting something
I don't know how to measure something that is based off a sixth sense anon.

[Anonymous No.11434500]

>>11434426
>If you are a solipsist and you come to me saying that, I will immediately refute your solipsism by my solipsism.
Yeah but that's not the situation. I'm not a solipsist, I'm asking why your line of reasoning doesn't lead to you to solipsism.
>It seems to suggest that you either accept a logical discrepancy
Do you think there's logical discrepancy in thinking that everyone is simultaneously right in thinking they are the "I", the point of view from which the world is seen, despite that these point of views are separate and contradictory which other and not experienced simultaneously? If not, why there is a logical discrepancy in saying that in these mind splitting thought experiments, both of the two persons are equally right in thinking themselves as the continuation of the person before the split, the body where the "I" ended up in, even though their point of views are distinct and not experienced simultaneously by anyone?

[Anonymous No.11434538]

>>11434500
that doesn't necessarily entail a solipsist view, because I think other minds are conscious. If you agree other minds are conscious, then your task becomes easier. If you are solipsist, firstly you cannot defend that claim because of the reason I just mentioned, and second, This one mind can apparently do anything, dream up unicorns in the middle of the road etc. If the solipsist holds that his view is real, he must also bear all accountability of all actions that occur in the world. Brings too many problems in than it solves, so I don't consider it seriously.

The twin/clone scenario doesn't make it immediately apparent if you keeping thinking about it as other minds. If you look at the problem as one mind = (cloned into) => two minds, then there is nothing to fret about. You didn't have access to FPP of the subject before, neither do you have it now. The information available to you just doubles in size.

FPP has this property of introducing a singularity of experience. Once you put yourself in the shoes of one person, then blending you up and reconstituting or teleporting your self to two different stations while reconstituting you will now make 3 of you. The question becomes hard to answer when you start thinking about the body you wake up in. Now you have a physical burden to explain, but since we eliminated that possibility by perfectly cloning you, we have a paradox. All your clones equally feel the same, yet your FPP is limited to one body and not all. Therefore not all properties are accounted for by TPP material objects. You are forced to extend your ontology if you plan on preserving the unitarity of FPP, otherwise you could easily jump between the three bodies, since FPP would be a pure functional output of dead matter.

[Anonymous No.11434548]

>>11434500
All this word game is just to show you the nature of self-identity and the ghastly problems it brings. If matter defines a person, then material structure is replicable. One clone commits a murder, who gets jailtime? What if you get it and the clone escapes? The judge can't tell the difference but you can. There are these truths, that you only you can know. You know that you didn't commit the murder, but the legal system doesn't care, your dna matched the blood stain or whatever. Point being, this is all to reflect the discrepancies when using 3rd person objective data to explain first person subjective experience. Clearly there are more but self identity is one of the most pressing one.

[Anonymous No.11434552]

>>11434109
Regarding the first paragraph, because your brain doesn't send signals to the other one, if they are exactly the same that doesn't mean they send signals to eachother, you'll still be in the same location and be the same brain, you'll just be indistinguishable. If you are indistinguishable and distance doesn't matter then you are the other person too. Difference being that in a practical scenario, different people are experiencing different things/have experienced different things and therefore their brains are not built and firing the same way. Once again, one brain does not send signals to the other.

For the second one, both of them are me. Both of them have consciousness identical to me, both of them are me. I cannot wake up in two different bodies, no, because these are 2 separate bodies. Both of these bodies will still have my consciousness and remember exactly the same things, you'll just have duplicated them. They will be indistinguishable from "original" me. Their consciousness will just be copies of mine.

[Anonymous No.11434580]

>>11434552
okay I see you are arguing about the logistics of the thought experiment and not the real issue of self identity which was the main illustration. Fine. I'll try my best to explain:

>because your brain doesn't send signals to the other one, if they are exactly the same that doesn't mean they send signals to eachother, you'll still be in the same location and be the same brain, you'll just be indistinguishable

First sentence: I'm a brain not sending signals to each other. You've gone too far in the analysis. Ofcourse as time progresses, because they are 2 different bodies, they will start being conscious of different things - they will diverge.

The second point you mention is that there will be two of me. But haven't you jumped ship from FPP to TPP by saying there will be two of me? Let's say you are a pot. I break you: you go lights out, and mix your clay with more clay and carve out two exact pots. I know both will say they are the same pot.

Before breaking, you used to see out of your pot-eyes. Now that there are 2 pairs of pot eyes, which eyes are yours? Whose eyes do you see out of? You haven't died as a pot because your functional body remains, infact two of them now. Which pot goes lights on from YOUR perspective? Be the pot and think. If you say pot on the left side, I will ask you why exactly that pot. You will be required to explain what is special about that pot that is not there in the other pot.

Would you be fine if I broke you because the other pot would get to live? Don't you see the duality that has crept in? If I hurt the other pot, you won't flinch but if I hurt you (one of the pots) you hurt. So morally speaking, who should I let live? In other words, is physical characteristics enough to explain your FPP?

[Anonymous No.11434587]

>>11434552
> For the second one, both of them are me. Both of them have consciousness identical to me, both of them are me. I cannot wake up in two different bodies, no, because these are 2 separate bodies. Both of these bodies will still have my consciousness and remember exactly the same things, you'll just have duplicated them. They will be indistinguishable from "original" me. Their consciousness will just be copies of mine.

You contradict yourself in the second sentence by saying there are two separate bodies. If you claim there are two of you, then you must also claim you can control both bodies. If you are saying there are two of you but you are just in one of the bodies, you cannot control the other body and the other body is now a separate individual albeit functionally similar but experiences will quickly start to diverge and in 10 years you'll both barely be the same person even. You keep using the pronoun "Their" when I specifically ask you which one of those bodies would you see out of after the cloning was complete. If you think you were awake while being cloned, lets knock your awareness out. Now where do you wake up? Room A or Room B? both rooms look identical. The problem is intractable from FPP.

[Anonymous No.11434600]

>>11434538
>Therefore not all properties are accounted for by TPP material objects. You are forced to extend your ontology if you plan on preserving the unitarity of FPP, otherwise you could easily jump between the three bodies, since FPP would be a pure functional output of dead matter.
Let's assume there is this "you" over and above the experience and memories, that which experiences and remembers. What it would feel like for this thing to "jump" between these bodies? After jumping to another body it couldn't possibly remember the unique memories of the body it left, because there's no telepathic transfer of information between the brains, so it wouldn't remember having done jump. In fact for all you know you might possess this ability right now. You could have the ability to switch perspectives with anyone at your will and maybe you just did that and forgot.

I think this just highlights the problem with closed individualism, the view on personal identity you seem to believe in extremely strongly - the non-reductive aspect of personality seems to do no explanatory work at all, even on a subjective level.

[Anonymous No.11434601]

>>11434580
Regarding the pot analogy. Each pot has its original consciousness, so that consciousness will see out of both pot eyes. If the inputs into the pot eyes changes however, there will be something to distinguish the pots into two different individuals. However without any difference they're the same. They don't send signals to eachother but they're still gonna experience the same stuff. Remember that consciousness is a function of the object.

>>11434587
>You contradict yourself in the second sentence by saying there are two separate bodies. If you claim there are two of you, then you must also claim you can control both bodies.

Well, each body has a copy of my consciousness. The consciousness is a function of their brain and therefore "me" controls both bodies, as long as that consciousness is indistinguishable between the two. If the bodies are experiencing different things though, the consciousnesses will be different and therefore they'll be separate.


If I make a perfect copy of your computer and swap it out with your current one, will it still compute the same? If I change something in the other computer but not the one you're currently using, will they display different things?

[Anonymous No.11434610]

>>11434600
cont. my point is that if we can indeed believe in physicalism, closed individualism and assume that you should be able switch between the three minds if they are all equally "you". The redundancy of the non-reductive aspect of personhood just becomes all the more clear so I would just get rid of it.

[Anonymous No.11434614]

>>11434610
>my point is that if we can
*my point is that we can

[Anonymous No.11434635]

>>11434548
>One clone commits a murder, who gets jailtime?
The clone who was at the murder. Forensic evidence can tell you which one was there. This has nothing to do with identity.

[Anonymous No.11435122]

>>11434635
are you stupid? forensic evidence can get you to match DNA. DNA which you BOTH share.

[Anonymous No.11435136]

>>11434601
You keep committing the fallacy of other minds. Even in the pot analogy, you speak in "their" pronouns. Why don't you want to put yourself in the analysis? You're typing the keyboard. Ask what are you. I'm not interested in the identity of third person objects as they are already understood by science to the quantum level. We're talking about subjectivity here and all you're doing is explaining it away without telling me which one of the clones persist the first person consciousness in case there are multiple beings sharing your exact physical construction. If you say you are conscious because your structure is, then you need to provide evidence to support that claim. Why are you who you are?

[Anonymous No.11435169]

Why was I born in this body that I inhabit right now and not (You)r body? What are the odds of that?

[Anonymous No.11435185]

>>11435169
exactly. if you know please let me know.

[Anonymous No.11435190]

>>11435185
Did anyone EVER know?

[Anonymous No.11435191]

>>11435169
Somebody had to be you, might as well be you.

[Anonymous No.11435195]

>>11433720
>What the hell are human beings anyway?
cock sucking mother FUCKING cuntbags fucking mother fuckers stupid FUCKING PRICKS

[Anonymous No.11435234]

>>11433720
Human beings are an entropic chemical reaction that converts the living biosphere into inert, toxic waste.

[Anonymous No.11435314]

>if my phsyical body moves I move with it
>no matter what memories I form I am still me
>you could replace every atom in my body and I would still be me (this more or less happens already)
>somehow supposed to believe particles and forces create my mind despite the fact that if a perfect clone of me existed he would not be my same consciousness

[Anonymous No.11435323]

>>11433950
That makes no sense at all though you are just denying the reality of consciousness. I am a realist so unreal arguments like this do not interest me.

[Anonymous No.11435334]

>>11435323
Denying the ego is not the same as denying experience. Buddhists do the same thing.

[Anonymous No.11435336]

>>11435334
>334
so close. you tried bro

[Anonymous No.11435337]

>>11435334
He is denying the continuity of consciousness which is denying experience actually.

[Anonymous No.11435345]

>>11435337
Well he's a bit silly and probably hyperbolic in saying "completely different".

[Anonymous No.11435346]

>>11435345

[Anonymous No.11435349]

>>11435345
Okay i thought he was trying to make the old consciousness doesn't real argument.

[Anonymous No.11435424]

>>11435314
You and clone both wake up and are not told which is the clone

How do you figure out which is the clone?

[Anonymous No.11435497]

>>11435424
steel caged death match.