How Your Brain Decides Without You (2014)

Essentially, Achilles says "A, therefore Z." Tortoise says, "Well, suppose I don't see the connection here, you have some symbols on this side and some symbols on that side, could you help me?" So Achilles modifies this to, "A, and A implies Z, therefore Z." And the Tortoise says, "well, that sounds very good and I trust your proof that A implies Z but I'm still not seeing the connection here. Could you help me connect those left hand things to the right hand thing?" So Achilles modifies this to "A, and A implies Z, and (A and A implies Z) implies Z, therefore Z." And the Tortoise says, "aha, of course '(A and A implies Z) implies Z' ... but wait, now that I've written that down, I again don't see the connection here...". Essentially the point is that our generic rule that replaces "x and x implies y" with "x and y" is a process which lives outside the declarative scope of formal logic. (In the Curry-Howard isomorphism: you can have a value of type `x` and a function which turns values of type `x` into values of type `y`, but these are definitions, and there is no way to capture the true process of applying the function to the value -- just another declaration of another function which has type `x → (x → y) → y` which is by itself never involved in a process.)

(As an amateur physicist, I hasten to remind everyone that Zeno won in the end; there is a context which Zeno could have never foreseen where a Zeno paradox makes a certain kind of motion impossible. The reason nobody can travel faster than light is that if you take your spaceship and try to race a light beam, first you throw down a beacon, and then you accelerate to speed c/2 relative to that beacon -- in your shiny new reference frame, due to the constancy of the speed of light in inertial reference frames, the light beam is still moving at speed c away from you.)

Why do you think that?

I don't, actually; I think I'm awesome at being corrected and just happen to be right most of the time. Fortunately I'm often able to catch my biased, subconscious reactions before I say anything.

"All boundaries are merely useful fictions." -Buckminster Fuller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism)

In general I think we are still adjusting to what science tells us about who "we" are.

For example, we know we're animals. As animals, we experience a concept of "self." So why would we assume that no other animals experience a concept of self?

We know that the mind arises from the brain. So why would we make a distinction between our concept of self and the "other" parts of the brain? The title of the above article is essentially clickbait, in my opinion. There is no scientific basis for distinguishing between the brain and the self.

Self comes with language acquisition, which rewires the brain. That's why almost no one remember their baby days, it seems.

Before that language conditioning you are a perfect animal.)

I agree that an unqualified sweeping statement - possibly just regurgitated from various religious sources - shouldn't be blindly accepted. That sort of religiously-prescribed attitude also conveniently justifies maltreatment of animals at slaughter, even though research suggests that, e.g. the slitting of an animal's throat causes far greater suffering rather other more modern approaches.

And yet, you did the same thing for your comment.

Anyway, your preferred style of writing does exist and its called a research paper. Thankfully, the world is big enough to accmodate other styles of writing.

We have a slightly bizarre illusion of separate consciousness, but it's impossible to grow into a full adult human without being connected - in many different ways - to the wider human network.