I agree with the vast majority of the outlook expressed in this comment, too.The Buddhist answer is that the self is not a permanently existing entity . . . — Wayfarer
This brings me back to another point of Dukkha's: The idea of 'ownerless' experience. It seems to me that 'mineness' is essential (even if it's a lower karma-compromised calcification of a deeper experiential stream or storehouse ( Wayfarer ) ) because that's precisely what explains the apprehension felt at our own impending torture. If all experience is ownerless, then everyone should be well afeared of anyone's torture, past or present. — csalisbury
eg a soul, Cartesian ego, something like that), but would have the experiential felt quality of 'mineness'. — Dukkha
This is the origin of the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” otherwise known as the “qualia problem.” From the concrete material objects of everyday life, Descartes and the moderns who have followed him derived two abstractions. First, they abstracted out those features that could be captured in exclusively quantitative terms, reified this abstraction, and called that reified abstraction “matter,” or “the physical,” or that which is “objective.” Second, they abstracted those qualitative features that would not fit the first, quantitative picture, reified that abstraction, and called it “the mental,” or that which is “subjective.” Once this move was made, there was never in principle going to be a way to get mind and matter together again, since they were in effect defined by contrast with one another. — Ed Feser
That is why there is an emphasis on 'insight meditation' - through insight meditation you actually learn to see the processes of 'I-making and mine-making' unfolding in real time, so to speak, in the laboratory of your own mind and body. — Wayfarer
to quest, as I used to say — Punshhh
If memory is to serve as a condition for selfhood, then it must circumscribe some region - it must draw a line and say: that which happens within this boundary will be preserved in the memory of entity x. If memory is to be the eminence grise behind selfhood, it must also be a drawer of boundaries. And that makes things difficult. Because that which draws the boundary is also that which is to be bounded. — csalisbury
I'm sure personal identity is a psycho-social construct, but such a construct requires a lower-level continuity in order to even get off the ground - The construction of a self-narrative requires some kind of spatio/temporal/experiential boundary (boundary-process?) which excludes certain experiences/elements as candidates for integration in a self-construct and includes others. — csalisbury
And in any case, I don't think the thought experiment I've posed is all that extraordinary. Throughout history, many people have awaited torture. This is a far cry from teleportation. — csalisbury
Explain why it makes sense for someone who knows he will soon be tortured - but isn't being tortured yet - to fear the impending event.
I don't understand your difficulty. Memory doesn't have to draw any boundaries: it's not like it can choose a different scope or perspective than that which is given by the conditions in which its bearer finds itself. To put it simply, you can't have memories of what you (your body, for lack of a better term) haven't experienced. — SophistiCat
The difficulty there is, the soul, the 'cogito', is never an object of experience. To say that it is 'something' is precisely to reify an abstraction. Why? Because the Cartesian 'res cogitans' was an abstraction which then became reified, i.e. treated as an actual object or something that exists. There is no such thing, but that doesn't mean 'the soul doesn't exist'.
What has an experiential felt quality of 'mineness'? Actually, nothing does. It is wholly and solely a quality in consciousness. — Wayfarer
Talking about it as a 'something' projects it as 'existing', which just results in confusion, because there is no such thing 'out there somewhere'. —
I'm quite certain Descartes thought the 'thinking thing/substance' actually existed, and wasn't just some non-existent abstraction he falsely believed exists. I can't tell whether you're arguing against my understanding of Descartes, or agreeing with the post? — Dukkha
I don't understand your difficulty. Memory doesn't have to draw any boundaries: it's not like it can choose a different scope or perspective than that which is given by the conditions in which its bearer finds itself. To put it simply, you can't have memories of what you (your body, for lack of a better term) haven't experienced.
No, your thought experiment is not extraordinary. It is indeed so ordinary that it does not present a problem that you think it does.
Would you be willing to sum up the problem presented as you see it? I'd like to measure my intent against the actual effect, in order to revise and tweak. — csalisbury
Yeah, I wasn't as clear I ought to have been (and I lost sight myself of my initial strategy.) It's not that the fear of impending torture is a 'problem' itself - the idea is to elicit an explanation of why we should be afraid of such a thing that wouldn't apply equally to a fear of life after death.The "problem" is that there is supposedly a question that cries out for an explanation: why do I care about something that is going to happen to me in the future?
Yeah, I wasn't as clear I ought to have been (and I lost sight myself of my initial strategy.) It's not that the fear of impending torture is a 'problem' itself - the idea is to elicit an explanation of why we should be afraid of such a thing that wouldn't apply equally to a fear of life after death. — csalisbury
And it looks like you have an answer (your intent to naturalize has indeed been obvious, I note neutrally) - self-identity is supervenient on bodily identity (& extrapolating: since the body loses its identity after death, there's nothing left to supervene on.) It will be my body that is tortured; there will be no body after I die.
Is that fair? — csalisbury
OK, but what kind of an explanation are we looking for? If we are looking for a motivation (why ought we be afraid), that's one thing. If we are looking for a "third-person" explanation of the phenomenon - that's another thing, or rather a number of things, depending on the chosen framework for the explanation - psychology, evolutionary biology, neurophysiology, non-naturalist metaphysics.
Not quite. I proposed earlier that self-identity is a mental construct, partly innate, partly a product of culture, personal development and even preference. As such, it doesn't have to strictly supervene on the body, the way, say, cognition presumably supervenes on the neurophysiology of the nervous system. However, the body does provide a natural preexisting "boundary" (as you put it) that most ordinary conceptions of self-identity respect at least in part. Certainly, the raw feeling of the continuity of self that we experience moment-to-waking moment goes along with the normal functioning of the body with its given boundaries. But the more abstract intellectual concept of self-identity can and often does extend beyond that boundary - in the hypothesized afterlife, for instance, or a reincarnation. Or sometimes in other directions as well: the ancestors, the tribe or the country, or even the world.
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