The half-baked philosophical conundrum that keeps me up at night most often is simply: why is my consciousness limited to me in particular? Why am I not everyone? Or everything? or nobody? Or you? Or an ant? Or an ant colony? How did I find myself in this particular stream and what is the nature of the boarders that keep me within it?
This idea generally frustrates and freaks me out and I doubt there is a sensible answer, I doubt it's productive to think about, but I worry on it over and over.
@futurebird Thought about this my whole life too. For me, that singular self-aware I is the fundamental essence of consciousness. Sure nature, nurture, memory and hormones come into it, but that enduring I is at the heart of it all. Now it's possible it's just an emergent phenomena generated by the brain, sure. But it's also possible there is, in fact, only one universal consciousness, a field if you will, we all share. Some say so it (we) can experience everything.
@futurebird I have a very early memory of asking my dad a question along this line… I used a rabbit as an example. Could I have been a rabbit instead? Why am I not a rabbit anyway? He was disturbed about it…
"ha ha ... silly child, but I am the rabbit? You are the rabbit? Each of us is each other and each of us is everything as it always has been. Look I'll show you. You are-- oh. Oh no!"
He looks at you with dread, something not connecting.
"I don't know how this has happened but, somehow, you aren't a part of all of us. This is something new!
This resonates with me. And then there are people with DID and are the alters multiple consciousnesses or...?
Everything around consciousness, including the fact that it's time bounded (particularly the end part) gives me existential dread. I'm glad I'm not alone?
@futurebird There are practical ways of looking at this, like that the connection of your nervous systems is weaker than within your own. Those weak connections are still really cool — like, we’re making one right now, and now we both are slightly different people because of this conversation.
It’s too slow to help me get away from a leopard, but fast enough to help us learn from each other how to not be eaten by a leopard.
@futurebird The flip side to this is, is the me asking this question now the same as the me I remember doing something else five minutes ago? We share memories (or I do with past me, not vice versa) but is the consciousness the same?
@futurebird
and the allied question - who is driving? Is my consciousness driving this meat machine around and deciding to pick stuff up, drink things, eat etc., or is it just a passenger, tagging along and having thoughts about it.
"The Minds I" by Hofstadter was a very vertigo-inducing book for a teenager to read.
@moira
There was a course I did eons back on how the visual system works, and it was so entirely different to the TV-Camera model I had expected, and just so weird, jerry-rigged, and so many odd little bits and pieces, I never quite felt the same again about "who is driving"
Some of the visual experiments to demonstrate it were just effing alien
@mloxton@futurebird Oh yeah, the visual system is absolute lunacy. That it actually works reasonably well (even with hilariously exploitable gaps, some of which I'm 100% sure you've seen) is honestly amazing.
@futurebird
A Taoist verse attributed to Zhuangzi goes,
“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
@futurebird Ever since I read about this, I imagine humans’ brains covered with starfish-like surfaces, invisibly flicking our microtubules at each other to create a giant cloud of quantum consciousness.
@futurebird I assume that my consciousness is akin to software that runs on the hardware of my body, which is why it is limited to me in particular. And only to parts of me, since my body is doing so many things my mind is unaware of.
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