3 ms·

There's one conception of self that I consider fairly constant, my ability to consciously perceive what's going on around me. Despite the fact that all of my bo

There's one conception of self that I consider fairly constant, my ability to consciously perceive what's going on around me. Despite the fact that all of my body's cells get replaced completely every 7 years, _the fact that I perceive the world from "my" perspective remains constant_ Apart from that, I don't believe in a self. I assume, that when I die, this perspective goes away as well, I consider death to equal a total loss of consciousness ability to percieve.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> _the fact that I perceive the world from "my" perspective remains constant_ That's only your perception because you have memory. If we copied your memories right now and put them in a robot body 3000 years from now, it would also have the illusion of a single continuous perspective.
- gowld 8y ago
  And that robot would be me.
  - tylerjwilk00 8y ago
    What if we put "me" into 2 robots? What if one robot "killed" the other "me"?
CuriouslyC 8y ago
How do you know it was the same consciousness doing the perceiving, though? You think because you can remember things that you were also the one that perceived them, but you can take a hard drive and move it from one computer to another and the data is still accessible. It is likely there is no part of you that is fixed, even your consciousness. On the plus side, much like matter and energy, it is unlikely that consciousness is created or destroyed in the operations of the universe. Instead, it just gets reconfigured.
simonh 8y ago
Have you really been continually conscious throughout that time though? Recent thinking about this in neurology is that we are not. We're not concious most of the time we are asleep, and in fact are unaware of our own thoughts much of the time we are awake. Arguably when we are 'lost in the moment' or acting on instinct or training there's really not much conscious cognition going on because frankly it just gets in the way. It seems likely that conscious thought is something we only do as and when we need or want to, but we spend much of our time in an 'animal' state. Have you ever been reading a book and someone had to poke you to make you aware of them? The auditory processing parts of your brain were simply not functioning. We switch on and off different faculties of the brain all the time, and immediate conscious awareness of the present is just another one of those.
dsubburam 8y ago
> I assume, that when I die, this perspective goes away as well, I consider death to equal a total loss of consciousness ability to percieve. The perspective goes away, but the ability to perceive is not part of the perspective. An old telescope goes offline, but the scientist is still there, peering through other telescopes. The body dies, but that which experiences the world through it doesn't. This is from "the perennial philsophy" (cf. Aldous Huxley), if you want to look into it, though a bit esoteric and not easy to find a contemporary simple explanation of it.
gowld 8y ago
Has your perspective ever changed? Have you ever had amnesia (loss of memory), or creation of false memory, via disease, injury, inebriation, or anesthesia? 99.99% likely you have.
- azeirah 8y ago
  It definitely has, I wanted to include the word "permanent" in my definition, but thought it'd be a bit much. I've experienced blackouts, extremely deep sleep (where you go to sleep and feel like you wake up a second later, even though 8 hours have passed) and driving on autopilot, where your consciousness just goes away completely, and you find yourself 10 minutes closer to your destination, as if you've teleported. I'm not saying my conscious perception is constant, but if you plot consciousness as a binary variable on a graph (conscious, not conscious), a lifetime would look something like this, relatively constant. Before birth Birth ..... life ...... death .............................~~--------------------------------------.------------------................ . = not conscious ~ = ..? - = conscious And I'd argue that during dreams you're conscious too, you just forget about it, this claim is supported by contemporary research on sleep and dreaming for as far as my pop-psychology knowledge goes.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> _the fact that I perceive the world from "my" perspective remains constant_ That's only your perception because you have memory. If we copied your memories right now and put them in a robot body 3000 years from now, it would also have the illusion of a single continuous perspective.

gowld 8y ago
And that robot would be me.
- tylerjwilk00 8y ago
  What if we put "me" into 2 robots? What if one robot "killed" the other "me"?

CuriouslyC 8y ago

How do you know it was the same consciousness doing the perceiving, though? You think because you can remember things that you were also the one that perceived them, but you can take a hard drive and move it from one computer to another and the data is still accessible. It is likely there is no part of you that is fixed, even your consciousness. On the plus side, much like matter and energy, it is unlikely that consciousness is created or destroyed in the operations of the universe. Instead, it just gets reconfigured.

simonh 8y ago

Have you really been continually conscious throughout that time though? Recent thinking about this in neurology is that we are not. We're not concious most of the time we are asleep, and in fact are unaware of our own thoughts much of the time we are awake. Arguably when we are 'lost in the moment' or acting on instinct or training there's really not much conscious cognition going on because frankly it just gets in the way. It seems likely that conscious thought is something we only do as and when we need or want to, but we spend much of our time in an 'animal' state. Have you ever been reading a book and someone had to poke you to make you aware of them? The auditory processing parts of your brain were simply not functioning. We switch on and off different faculties of the brain all the time, and immediate conscious awareness of the present is just another one of those.

dsubburam 8y ago

> I assume, that when I die, this perspective goes away as well, I consider death to equal a total loss of consciousness ability to percieve. The perspective goes away, but the ability to perceive is not part of the perspective. An old telescope goes offline, but the scientist is still there, peering through other telescopes. The body dies, but that which experiences the world through it doesn't. This is from "the perennial philsophy" (cf. Aldous Huxley), if you want to look into it, though a bit esoteric and not easy to find a contemporary simple explanation of it.

gowld 8y ago

Has your perspective ever changed? Have you ever had amnesia (loss of memory), or creation of false memory, via disease, injury, inebriation, or anesthesia? 99.99% likely you have.

azeirah 8y ago
It definitely has, I wanted to include the word "permanent" in my definition, but thought it'd be a bit much. I've experienced blackouts, extremely deep sleep (where you go to sleep and feel like you wake up a second later, even though 8 hours have passed) and driving on autopilot, where your consciousness just goes away completely, and you find yourself 10 minutes closer to your destination, as if you've teleported. I'm not saying my conscious perception is constant, but if you plot consciousness as a binary variable on a graph (conscious, not conscious), a lifetime would look something like this, relatively constant. Before birth Birth ..... life ...... death .............................~~--------------------------------------.------------------................ . = not conscious ~ = ..? - = conscious And I'd argue that during dreams you're conscious too, you just forget about it, this claim is supported by contemporary research on sleep and dreaming for as far as my pop-psychology knowledge goes.