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> I am the thing making decisions. Well if that's your premise, then I think we're already done. If someone makes a decision, but doesn't tell you about it,
by joeyo 15y ago
> I am the thing making decisions.
Well if that's your premise, then I think we're already done.
If someone makes a decision, but doesn't tell you about it, is it your decision? What if they make a decision and then inform you about it later, is it yours now? Finally, what if they make a decision, tell you about it, and then you actually enact it? Can we even call this yours?
- nooneelse 15y ago>Well if that's your premise, then I think we're already done. Why call one part of my brain me, but not the other part of my brain me? I took jerf's point to be that the part doing the awareness/recording can be different from the part deciding, but that doesn't mean the part deciding isn't me.
- joeyo 15y agoI don't personally think there is a single, unitary self-- a man in the head so to speak. It may be a convenient useful fiction but it probably misleads our intuition on these matters.
- jerf 15y agoYou're injecting the term "someone" as if it has some sort of meaning. What is this "someone" who isn't me? Define it, precisely. How do I determine whether some neuron in my brain is either mine, or this "someone"'s? I'd contend this "someone" is an artifact of your thought processes, not a real thing that you can actually define, and furthermore when neuroscientists disprove the existence of this "someone", it is their own artifact that they are disproving, not anything that corresponded to reality in the first place. This is an interesting result, just as in the gravity example I gave earlier, but it certainly seems to be very common for scientists to get a little too expansive about the artifact they have disproved.