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Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV. A decent part of our body is made up of bacteria that doesn't even share ou

Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV. A decent part of our body is made up of bacteria that doesn't even share our DNA (gut bacteria, etc). Our minds have very little control over most of our cells. We generally have a ship of Theseus going on and replace most of our cells every few years. The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider. There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones could become an extension of our body. Will that feeling change if we start implanting tech? With social insects like ants, is an ant more like an individual organism or are ants just limbs with the hive as the "me"?

dvt 5y ago
> Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV. Everything we observe goes through our first-person-perspective, therefore there's no such thing as a "scientific" POV. We come to consensus, true, but it's still through first-person-experiential phenomena, and not some kind of external "science" validator. > The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider. There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones could become an extension of our body. I'm not sure what cellphones have to do with anything, there are much better examples of the "fuzziness" of identity: conjoined twins, multiple personality, schizophrenia, dementia, corpus callosotomy, etc. These are all edge cases, though. We still barely understand the degenerate case.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Looking at edge cases often is the best way to find and understand the boundaries of something, to more clearly define it by looking at edge cases and seeing where certain "core" attributes persist or disappear.
- trevyn 5y ago
  > some kind of external "science" validator I dunno, we have some pretty exquisite sensing machines today. Including machines that can sense the workings of the hardware running our first-person-experiential experiences. Just because the bitstream happens to come in today via our eyeballs doesn’t make the actual bitstream any less objective and truthy.
mtalantikite 5y ago
> Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV. A decent part of our body is made up of bacteria that doesn't even share our DNA (gut bacteria, etc). For sure. One of the early stages of many Buddhist meditation practices involves reflection on this question, looking for the "me" using various methods. Eventually the realization is of the emptiness (sunyata) of self and all phenomena. There's nothing that can be solidly considered self (atman). The Heart Sutra is one of the texts that elaborates on it: [1] https://plumvillage.org/sutra/the-heart-sutra/ https://plumvillage.org/sutra/the-heart-sutra/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra

dvt 5y ago

> Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV. Everything we observe goes through our first-person-perspective, therefore there's no such thing as a "scientific" POV. We come to consensus, true, but it's still through first-person-experiential phenomena, and not some kind of external "science" validator. > The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider. There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones could become an extension of our body. I'm not sure what cellphones have to do with anything, there are much better examples of the "fuzziness" of identity: conjoined twins, multiple personality, schizophrenia, dementia, corpus callosotomy, etc. These are all edge cases, though. We still barely understand the degenerate case.

PeterisP 5y ago
Looking at edge cases often is the best way to find and understand the boundaries of something, to more clearly define it by looking at edge cases and seeing where certain "core" attributes persist or disappear.
trevyn 5y ago
> some kind of external "science" validator I dunno, we have some pretty exquisite sensing machines today. Including machines that can sense the workings of the hardware running our first-person-experiential experiences. Just because the bitstream happens to come in today via our eyeballs doesn’t make the actual bitstream any less objective and truthy.

mtalantikite 5y ago

> Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV. A decent part of our body is made up of bacteria that doesn't even share our DNA (gut bacteria, etc). For sure. One of the early stages of many Buddhist meditation practices involves reflection on this question, looking for the "me" using various methods. Eventually the realization is of the emptiness (sunyata) of self and all phenomena. There's nothing that can be solidly considered self (atman). The Heart Sutra is one of the texts that elaborates on it: [1] https://plumvillage.org/sutra/the-heart-sutra/ https://plumvillage.org/sutra/the-heart-sutra/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra