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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or biological readings.

Yeah, this is touched on in Philosophy of Mind classes. It's just a very uninteresting and reductionist view that's probably wrong, so no one really takes it seriously, much like solipsism or the idea that we live in a simulation.

Our entire experience informs us that the world is real, that other minds are real, that our own self-awareness and sense of me-ness is real. There's no real reason to doubt any of it, other than playing clever little logical gotcha' games. A caveat here is that philosophers do write about the reality of things in very deep and meaningful ways and Cartesian skepticism is certainly worth studying.

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> sense of me-ness is real

The most important word here is "sense" -- I don't think anyone can argue that the sense of individuality isn't real. But how much of our personal narratives are true, and how much of them do we make up to try and make sense of an otherwise chaotic existence? That isn't a fluffy philosophical musing; it's a core question of human psychology.

Some Buddhist teachings speak of "word sickness", where we spend so much of our lives living in abstractions that we are unable to experience the present moment as it actually is. We've drawn boxes around phenomena to try and classify everything, without realizing that we do this in ways that reinforce our own identities and sense of meaning in the world. We tend to treat the things we are good at as more important than the things we aren't, for instance. So how much of one's concept of self is really real, and how much has been invented to coalesce a sense of identity?

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"?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra

It is usually only when you wake up from a dream when you find out it was only a dream.

You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real.

One would say seeing a person floating during a magician act was real because we experienced it, but the only thing real was the illusion performed by the magician.

> You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real.

Gobbledygook nonsense. People much smarter than both of us have been asking these questions since the dawn of time, best get to some reading.

“Some reading” consists of thousands of books, which some of us unfortunately(?) have no time to grep. Can you provide some concise excerpts which are to the point? It seems unlikely that this question is raised for the first time and there is no “wiki” to point to.

Ps. I’m not “link!”-ing you, just asking for a way to learn something without burying myself for a lifetime into works which mostly disagree with each other.

A good starting point may be "Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings", edited by David Chalmers. A second edition was recently published.

It contains papers by most important philosophers in the field of 'philosophy of mind'. The papers are surprisingly accessible, and require little to no prior knowledge.

But we do live in a simulation - a simulation generated purely in our minds based on the input to our senses that come from objective reality. We certainly don't perceive objective reality directly, otherwise our senses would be overloaded with all the information. We evolved to filter out many of the things that we didn't need to perceive in order to survive. Our mind does enough simulation that it's able to rewind the clock to fill in missing details (like the whole "when I look at a second hand, the first second takes longer to tick" thing, that's your brain literally lying to you about what it saw and retroactively filling in the blanks).

experience informs

How are derealization, depersonalization and similar conditions explained?

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