The Essence of Peopling
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> "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."
For me personally, this makes me think that the phenomenology of selfhood is very much dependent on perception and others. To be is to be perceived. In the absence of perception, the "I" dissolves.
Perhaps "I think, therefore I am" sorta still makes sense as long as you're aware of the fact that you're thinking. But as the Hermit describes– when you're alone for a long enough period, and you're not thinking about other people, or what other people will think of you when you return, or what letters you want to write for other people, "I" stops showing up. And therefore "I" does not exist. The entity that is the person is still hanging out in the forest, but he/it has no need for a name or any consistent identity.
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[1] http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201409/the-last-t...
I skimmed because frankly I'm too jaded to fully read something that doesn't start out with an introduction, telling me what's up ahead and why I should care and instead goes on and on for many pages.
The parts that I skimmed felt like the thoughts I tend to have regarding big ideas that haven't come together quite yet. There's definitely something, but it's elusive because something is missing, something big enough that it tends to cut many pages into a paragraph. That's what this feels like to me.
"In conclusion, drink tea, together with your friends; pay attention to the tea, and to your friends, and pay attention to your friends paying attention to the tea. Therein lies the meaning of life."
This is a terribly obnoxious thing to say to somebody after they've supposedly spent 20 minutes reading your article. The meaning of life?
I once read a book when I was 20 that blew my mind so hard that I spent the next year in varying degrees of telling others THEY need to do and think like I do because clearly, this feels so right and it felt so wrong prior. It was like falling in love with a new outlook on life, the infatuation takes a while to fade away.
If you're not careful, you can develop a guru complex where you start thinking you possess knowledge others need to urgently know about. That's where sentences like 'therein lies the meaning of life' come from I find.
That feeling will pass and you'll look back on having written words that imply you have life figured out and shake your head in disbelief :)
There are a few trillion atoms described, so it takes you a long time, but you spend your infinite minutes (or as long as you need) working through the various states, starting with time t=0 based on the reference books, and then for infinite minutes you just simply dilligently work through the state of the person and immediate environment, i.e. continue to model the atoms using the laws of physics, working it out manually, as a human calculator, and writing down all of your work. It is incredibly boring. About ten hours into it you ask for a pill to let you forget that you've already been doing this for ten hours, because it was only interesting for maybe half that time and there is no way you can do this for almost infinite time. Okay, you get a supply of those pills as well, and take one every ten hours. This leaves you all set to spend practically infinite time writing out all this meticulous description.
Now, once you're FINALLY done, and have done up through t=10minutes, which really practically takes you infinite time, you bind up all of your work and put the volumes in a row in multigalactically large bookshelf. Trillions of volumes. Then you're transported back to Earth and time resumes. Okay, for having trillions of volumes, ten hours (that you remember) wasn't too bad.
And now we know there are a series of volumes of books (that you've prepared by hand). At first (in the first few volumes) they describe an initial state of mind, and, due to the moment that was chosen (someone entertaining a train of thought regarding the Cogito) as you go through the volumes you are reading through someone's thoughts, i.e. the thoughts that this person exists.
But do they exist? Of course not: they are just a character in a book. That they think, "I think" does not cause them to exist, and a few volumes later they are done having that thought.
The volumes are all there from volume 1 up till x trillion trillion. You could, if you wanted to, read through them all. Do the characters inside exist? No.
So, the Cogito does not prove physical or metaphysical existence.
Let's say the character does not exist, this means there is no character going through the Cogito. Descartes' statement holds no meaning in this situation.
let's say the character does exist, it is going through the Cogito, which according to Descartes means there is some object that has to exist for these thoughts to arise. And there is! The books that you have painstakingly written exist somewhere to describe the thoughts of the character exist somewhere in the physical world (or whatever hypothetical world or universe you have theorised).
Is this not exactly Descartes' point? If we interpet it broadly: Whenever thought arises, this thought must materialise from some existing state or presence, thus proving the existance of 'something'. To give this object the identity of oneself is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but one could argue that if this state or presence creates these thoughts it can usually be associated with 'self' in whatever way you want to define it.
Are you sure about that?
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Seems weird to me that some scientists say the self and self-awareness are an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
I have trouble bringing myself to agree, my existence seems pretty real to me. I don't feel like an emergent property of a complex system.
In a way, we experience directly the metaphysical nature of our existence, and all the science we do is based on things much more indirectly observed and measured, and that metaphysical essence of our existence is sort of inaccessible to science.
Any philosophical questioning of the existence of existence is rendered moot by its inherent begging of the question and lack of consequence to physical reality.
Sir Arthur Eddington:
Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: No sea-creature is less than two inches long. All sea-creatures have gills. These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it. In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science. An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. "There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them." The icthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. "Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of icthyological knowledge. In short, "what my net can't catch isn't fish." Or--to translate the analogy-- "If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unverifiable by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah!
Prove it.
Sir Arthur Eddington...
I've seen that analogy before and it's silly, because 1. people have prior experience with sea creatures smaller than two inches, and 2. scientists are keenly aware of the limitations of their "nets," and those limitations leave very little room for metaphysics.
I think your 2. seems a little silly, metaphysics by definition is what is beyond science, which is the point Eddington is trying to make.
Thinking about metaphysics is a little like thinking about what happens inside a black hole, what happens to the physics and interactions and information. You can come up with a lot of theories but you'll never be able to test them. It's beyond our experience, but we can't say there is no reality going on beyond where we can measure and experience and reason about it.
I don't think it's fair, either, to compare metaphysics to black hole physics. Everything in my layman's understanding of physics, astronomy, and cosmology suggests that the prevailing theories of what happens inside a black hole are supported by evidence gathered from what happens outside a black hole, rather than being invented from scratch with no evidential basis.
For years I looked for a succinct and cohesive explanation of why Descartes is fundamentally misguided.
Just ordered my copy of 'Others in mind" (http://www.amazon.com/Others-Mind-Social-Origins-Self-Consci...) referenced in article.