The one thing that seems to me somehow necessary for “identity” is some level of duration–but given how rapidly we change, that raises some interesting questions too, about the relationship between stability and change. I keep thinking that someday I may write up a post on that, but so far, laziness and getting ready for my trip have prevailed.

Sounds to me like your “pill” had some memory residue, implied by your phrase “reveletory pathway”. Though that raises some interesting questions too, about memory and consciousness. Can something be reveletory if it’s not consciously remembered?

As for the magic pill question……..I have taken this pill on more than one occasion. I don’t remember many details, but I know I had a good time. I’m too old for this kind of fun now. The Grateful Dead came to my area last week and I didn’t make the 20 minute drive to get there. I stayed at home and listened to a simulcast on Sirius radio. As a younger fool, I would skip a final exam to go to a show. (Many a grandparent “expired” to excuse my absences.) Under the right circumstances, I would take the pill again but it would simply be an amusing distraction not a revelatory pathway.

Some time ago I ran across one of those internet quiz jobbies that asks questions and then presumes to tell you about yourself based on your answers. I don’t remember much about the specifics of this one, but I do remember it had a scenario asking something like the following:

If you could take a pill, and it would cause you to live out an entire lifetime in the space of a minute, and that lifetime would be filled with all sorts of pleasures–whatever gives you the most satisfaction and is most meaningful to you–but at the end you would have no memory of that life at all–would you take the pill? Why or why not?

This scenario, and your wife’s pre-seizure situation, I think have more in common with our ordinary lives than we might think. How much of any given day do we actually recall after a period of time has elapsed? Not much. I mean, pick a random day from 1965 or so, and see if you can remember anything at all that happened that day. I sure can’t–I can barely remember a few details of special occasions. So were “we” there in the first place? Even though we don’t remember it later? I sure think so–but it raises questions.

I don’t have a good answer on my wife’s state of conciousness when she is pre-siezure. It’s still “Beth”; but she’s kind of like one of those pod people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. I don’t usually discuss conciousness with her because she believes in God and spirits and souls and all that stuff. If it gives her comfort, who am I to contradict her? She knows I’m a joyful athiest and promises to put a good word in for me if I’m wrong. Besides, it would give her great satisfaction to prove me wrong one last time.

And now….A final (I swear) beating of this moribund horse of a question.

A rock always has existence until it is disassembled. Much like the wave in Morrie’s story. It only has “identity” when a brain assigns one to it.

A young boy skips a rock across a pond. A clam burrows under the rock for protection. An otter uses this rock to smash open the clam. One rock; yet three different identities were given to this object. Identity seems to depend on the beholder. Agreement on “identity” tends to be a function of how closely the observers are “related”. Existence is independent of the beholder.

I’m not sure I have anything to add to this topic that I haven’t already said. But I’ll take a whack.

Rocks may not have a sense of “I”–but do they nonetheless have some sort of identity? If not–how can we legitimately speak of “this rock”? Or take a drop of water sliding slowly down a window pane–is there a “something” that is that drop of water? And if so, what happens to the drop when it reaches the bottom and merges into the bool of water sitting on the window sill? Such questions have interested me for years, and I think that thinking about them in terms of interactive, if not inter-subjective, truth is the only way to make progress on them. Assuming progress can be made, or that we want to make progress.

So your “I” is simply any form of brain activity? I suspect I could slippery-slope you on that one. What if the activity is only in the brain stem, and between the brain stem and the machines they have you hooked you up to, that’s enough to sustain life in the body. No brain activity in the rest of your brain. Are “you” still there?

Benham wheels–I think I had heard of them, but didn’t think of them when writing about color vision here. A nice proof, if you will, that we don’t perceive the world directly in some simple and veridical fashion, but rather take various kinds of sensory input and process it in various ways to form mental models of the world. some of the processing being conscious and much more of it automatic, as the gift of evolution.

My first reaction to your wife’s situation was I wanted to give her a hug. But getting past that to implications for questions of consciousness: do you think that she is truly not conscious during the pre-seizure time, or only that the seizure wipes out the memory of that time retroactively? And what does your wife think about such questions, assuming she finds them worth thinking about (not everyone does)?

Ha! how about that. Not much to say, just more questions.

First, I’d like to start with the premise that the sense of individuality (“I” ) belongs exclusively to living forms. Rocks don’t have a sense of “I”. Brains and immune systems do. My brain and immune system are both very concerned with “me vs. other.” Why do I bring up the immune system? Because it is a non-concious system that appears to think. I believe that the brain is a multi-concious system that does think.

Which brings us to “thinking”. Being a bear of very little brain, I hesitate to go forward but here goes…..Thinking is the constructs of the brain when it is given information. We think when we dream. We think when we do algebra. Unless the brain has been damaged by trauma or turned way down by chemicals, we’re always “concious”. Who usually plays the lead in your dreams? And even if you aren’t the leading lady, you are still the primary audience. Well, what about “dreamless sleep”? I’m not an expert, but I believe that PET scans show that brain activity never stops. It just shifts from area to area depending on the function that is needed. I do know that brains are voracious consumers of oxygen and glucose at all times. Your brain’s oxygen and glucose needs don’t go away when you sleep so it must be “thinking”.

So I don’t think “I” go anywhere when I’m asleep.

As an aside, my wife has frequent seizures. 30 to 60 minutes prior to the grand mal, she is on some sort of autopilot where she appears to be “functioning” but in reality she is in something resembling an alcoholic blackout. She has no memory of her actions or thoughts and some times knows that she had a seizure only because she “wakes up” in an odd place in the house.

Lastly, I’ve noticed a lot of your peeps are interested in color perception. Have you ever heard of Benham wheels?
They are discs that have black and white patterns and when spun, create the illusion of color. Color is seen where it clearly does not exist.
ttfn

First, I don’t think we are irreducibly subjective. Subjective, yes–but not irreducibly so. Mysteriously, we do interact with and communicate with what’s “out there”, both in terms of the physical and in terms of other human beings. Second, while I would never put forward my perceptions, or even humanity’s collective perceptions as “what is”, neither do I reject it as all illusion. I do rather suspect that when I perceive a rock, something like a rock as I perceive it is actually there. I do not imagine that I have grokked (I seem to have been channeling “Stranger In A Strange Land” lately) the total reality of the rock–but nonetheless, I doubt that my perceptions are entirely wrong, either.

Third, I don’t know about “senior”, but I do believe that what’s “out there” preceded my existence, and will still be here in some form when I no longer am. So I suppose that is some kind of response to your first question as well–I would say the outside world (note I do not say “objective”–I suspect you’re mushing notions of “truth” and “reality”, which I see as related but distinct, and I’m not sure what “objective” reality would be)–as I was saying, I suspect the outside world trundles along quite nicely without me when I am deeply asleep, pretty much as it does when I am wide awake. I guess I would instead ask the question, what happens to “me” when I am deeply and dreamlessly asleep–do “I” still exist? Not a question that concerns me much, but it’s more of a question to me than what happens to outside-me reality.

And you do that every night in bed, and quite readily. Indeed such formless rest is absolutely essential for your sanity.

Sleep is the every mans Samadhi.

Such a state is your True Identity before you “fall” into indentification with the fear saturated meat-body when you “wake-up” every morning.

Where is the “objective” world?
Is there an “objective” world apart from the process of conception and perception that you are involved in?

Neuro-scientists tell us that what we see “out there” is a construction of our brain and nervous system which is projected to seem to be “out there”.

In other words we never ever see an independently existing “objective” world—we only ever see our own brain and nervous system patterned projections.

What does the world really look like then?

To claim that there is an objectively existing world apart from the process of conception and perception that we all engaged in is a terryfying illusion and also a
profoundly” reductionist view of what we are as human beings.

Flying rocks rule OK!

It makes what is supposedly “out there” senior to what we are as irreducibly subjective beings.

A number of possible responses occurred to me, not all of which I can remember. Here are some:

1. The questions no longer makes sense in the proposed situation. What would it mean for truth to exist, or not to exist?

2. No (given my definition of truth.) You can’t have a correspondence between two things if one of the things doesn’t exist.

3. If God exists, then yes; if God does not exist, then no.

4. What difference would it make? And to what?

5. There are no sentient creatures, but there are thermometers? How the heck did that happen?

Take your pick. Probably the ones I’ve forgotten were the best ones.

I started Life of Pi once (as a mathy sort of person, I felt obligated), but couldn’t get into it. I don’t really remember why. Maybe I was just disappointed to find it had nothing to do with math, even metaphorically.

Every creature that has sensory perception is suddenly gone. Doesn’t matter how, they are simply not present anywhere. Thermometers still respond to temperature, rain still falls and the planets still orbit the sun. But there isn’t a single life form present to bear witness. Does truth still exist?

P.S. I went to the book portion and I noticed that you haven’t read Life of Pi. Very good discusssion of truth and reality in that little book. The author went to Saint Mike’s in VT, as did my daughter. So she gave me a copy, and I loved it.

I think the distinction between what is real and what we believe about what is real is an important distinction, however it is made. I think people are all too inclined to mistake their own perception of reality, their own beliefs about reality, for reality itself. An error made both by postmodernists, who think (or claim to think) that believing something makes it true and by people who think there is one absolute reality and truth and they happen to know exactly what that is.

I know that defining truth as something like a good match between a model, statement, or belief and reality isn’t fully satisfactory. It definitely seems to miss something. But I haven’t been able to find one that works better, so I’ll stick with it. “Opinion” definitely captures the variability and subjectivity of our beliefs–but seems to imply that they are more arbitrary than I believe they need be. That is, some definitely are–and we’ll call those opinions, no problem. But I think we can approach closer to truth (in the sense of accurate correspondence to reality) than that, at times anyway, so your proposed use of “opinion” also leave out something important. It’s precisely a balance between purely arbitrary opinion and claims that absolute reality is known or knowable (and hence there can be “objective truth”) that I think “intersubjective truth” provides.

Here’s a comeback for you, formulated from my own experience and perception of the world.

There’s a difference between truth and reality. Reality is “what it is” regardless of what we think it is (mostly*). Truth is a statement about, or model of, or belief about, or perception of, reality. Statements about and models of reality are never complete, always partial. Statements and models are never independent of interpretation–anyone who believes that they can be has never studied human language or cognition in depth. Beliefs and perceptions can (I believe) be true for one person but not for another–that is, be a satisfactory model of reality for one person, but not work at all for someone else. Not ALL beliefs or perceptions have this property–there is such a thing as delusion or simply being wrong–but some kinds of beliefs or perceptions do, under some circumstances.

It occurs to me that perhaps what you are calling “truth” is what I am calling “reality” here, and that perhaps we don’t differ in our opinions all that much.

Let me know how that tree made out.

* My model of reality is actually many faceted–check out the “Reality” tab at the top if you’re interested in why I qualified this with “mostly”.

Why is it that humans have the capacity to do so much more than other animals? Is it true that we are a “special case” when we talk about evolution of species? From all these questions, would it be safe to say that a higher power generated all that we know, to be the way it is, to do the things it does, to live the way life is… is this the TRUTH for all of us?

I think TRUTH is an outlet for us to vent out all ideas, and eventually reach a wall, in which we cannot further explain why things are the way they are, and we wait for something/someone to explain to us that yes… that is in fact… TRUE… but this must be reached as a collective and its hard due to the realization that yea, we all have different OPINIONS on what is FACT and FICTION, either based in religion, environment, or even government

This is getting thick real quick so I’m gonna end it with this… It is important for use to have such debates/discussions because this is a proven way to define ourselves, our way of life, our laws and regulations, what is right compared to wrong, what is false and what is REAL, based on “inter-subjevtive truth” (really like that wording for some reason)