What does this mean? What's the "I" that's somehow separate from your specific physical instantiation?
Unless you're getting into Cartesian dualism and souls, I'm genuinely confused.
Unless you're getting into Cartesian dualism and souls, I'm genuinely confused.
But yes, if materialism is true, probably the question is empty. However, if some other philosophy of mind is true (there are many other options beyond just materialism and Cartesian dualism), maybe it means something. And, if one has this sense that it is profound rather than empty, that might give one a reason to prefer some other position in the philosophy of mind that treats that question more sympathetically.
Can you give some examples of the kind of options you're thinking of? I mean, I have a lot of time for functionalist accounts, and given Sufficiently Smart Technology (tm) I'm happy to allow for the possibility of something recognizably "me" being artificially duplicated in a different physical substrate. (After which we'd rapidly start diverging, and would need some new vocabulary to describe what's going on.)
But GGP's question was specifically about being born. I really struggle to imagine how someone born somewhere else, somewhen else, could be "me" with anything like the fidelity I think our intuition demands. And if you loosen your identity test to the point where it could, doesn't it then become useless as an individuation test, in that lots of people could be sufficiently like me all at the same time?
This is why I think it's tough to say "I - singular - could have been born in Brazil in 1873" without invoking something like a soul which acts as both an arbitrary GUID tag and as kind of mutex on embodiments.
Up front let me admit this is effectively a cheat.
BUT in a multiverse or infinite universe not only are there multiple “you’s“ there are in fact infinite identical versions of you. I grant that this is not taking the spirit of the conversation into account, and is untestable to boot, it is genuinely possible.
Note though that an infinite universe doesn't imply that everything imaginable occurs within it. There are an infinite number of even integers, but none of them is 3.
True, but in an infinite universe, everything with non-zero probability almost surely happens, an infinite number of times.
Since our own lives have non-zero probability of existing, a spatially infinite universe implies that almost surely there are an infinite number of exact copies of ourselves existing right now, and an infinite future implies that almost surely our current lives will be exactly repeated an infinite number of times in the future.
But when I say (or think) "I", am I saying or thinking of any specific one of those versions? How could I be? It seems, if there are infinite number of identical copies of me, when I say "I", I must mean all of them equally.
Though that still raises the question of why this particular set of living experiences and not others.
Also, if this sort of thing is the case, I think it would make being a moral person significantly more complex. You would need to not only make moral decisions, but create as many moral possible universes as possible and shut out the immoral universes from existence by not creating paths to them. Though I guess that would make me a highly immoral person at this point (causing pain and suffering in all the universes where I've died), though I do try to be moral in this universe as much as I can.
I'm not sure how easy it is even with idealism to make "Why am I I?" a meaningful question. But, if our choice is between viewing that question as a pointer to some profound mystery on the one hand, or viewing it as simply a case of muddle-headed confusion on the other, the allegiance of my heart is with the first choice rather than the second.
If preserving a sense of profound mystery is your goal then... honestly, that mindset is sufficiently alien to me that I can't really think of anything useful to say on the subject. I can understand and share it as an aesthetic choice - mysteries are cool! - but not as a philosophical one. Philosophy by definition is the love of knowledge, not the love of not-knowledge.
And if you want your mystery to be something you solve, rather than something you live with, I do think you should be able to explain what your mysterious question means.
Maybe the answer to the question then is not a proposition, but a liberation from that prison. If one is a religious believer, one might hope for that liberation after death. If one is a transhumanist (which is maybe just a different sort of religion), one might hope that future technologies like telepathy implants or mind uploading might make such a liberation possible.
We know that a human being can survive with large portions of their brain missing. Entire hemispheres in fact. You understand what it is to be the amalgamation of experiences from both hemispheres, but the hemispheres don't understand what it is to be that experience, they only know the experience of being a hemisphere.