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You are you. What are the chances?

10:58 / 14.06.05

In a really vague and unstructured way, I’ve been thinking about what makes me me and not somebody else. And it occurs to me that I’ve really got very little idea of some of the basics. So, I thought I’d start a Conversation thread in the hope that we might talk around the subject in such a way that might help crystallise what it is that’s on my mind.

A question to get started:
What are the chances that I was born? Did a particular sperm have to meet a particular egg (at a particular time?)? Are there other factors at play? If a different sperm from the same load got there first, would I not exist right now? Would someone else exist instead of me or would I be someone else, if you see what I mean? Is that a meaningful question?

I’m aware that there are different ways that the different people here might approach this (be it Labbish, Headshoppy or Tempular), which is ideal because the best approach is kinda what I’m looking for. With a bit of luck, some conversational, tangential musings here might throw up some more specific questions which might be fit to spin off into one of the more dedicated fora. Or maybe not. It’s more than possible that I’m being very stupid about this indeed. But you know, if that’s the case, don’t hesitate to tell me so.

12:30 / 14.06.05

'you' are the experience of living as the organic machine you are.
the you-ness is entirely unique to the specific shell, i reckon, and another sperm/egg mix would have been another person.
i feel it might still have been you in another sense, but not one i find particularly meaningful in my day to day philosophising.
i found life got easier for me to understand when i started to think of us as a bit less human in that old school, self important way...
i think that informs the above opinion.

12:44 / 14.06.05

'you' are the experience of living as the organic machine you are.
the you-ness is entirely unique to the specific shell, i reckon, and another sperm/egg mix would have been another person.

Yeah, that sounds about right to me, toksik. I don’t really know how one’s sperms vary, but I assume that there are genetic particulars that affect the resulting embryo. But, there are other factors that affect this shell, aren’t there. For example, would I not exist if, say, a difficult labour had left my brain damaged through oxygen starvation, if my mother had taken DNA-bending drugs like thalidomide, or drunk heavily through pregnancy, etc etc? I mean, would ‘I’ not have existed if events leading up to my birth had differed in any way from the circumstances that actually prevailed? Also, when did the meness of me begin?

12:57 / 14.06.05

i reckon you wouldnt exist if any of those things had affected your being.
if you are experiencing being a different thing, the 'you' changes.
see:that dude wot got an axe in his head 1900ish.

even something superficial would affect how it is to be the affected vessel, imho.
the experience of being you starting... i have no idea, but i suspect it isnt a switch-on moment, and instead is a kinda rolling stone gathering consciousness moss.
i think its all about what you mean and what you wanna know for.
there could be said to be an 'experience of being' for anything, even a rock. it depends what level of being you consider high enough to treat as a person/being/consciousness.

12:57 / 14.06.05

I am unique. A peculiar series of happy accidents resulted in my ancestors living long enough to breed and being attractive enough to find mates to breed with. Then, I happened to be born into a peculiar set of social and economic circumstances, in a specific part of the world, at a certain time, and was thereafter subject to a rich pageant of formative (and personal) experiences.

That's what makes me me - heredity and personal history. That's why I look the way I do, why I think the way I do and why I do the things I do.

One difference along the ancestral line and a whole lot of stuff might have been very different in me today. One difference in my circumstances during my formative years and I would have been very different.

Would be true for clones and identical twins too. There's a good bit of Richard Dawkins that I much search out, where he says all this much more elegantly, being a genius and all.

13:17 / 14.06.05

Right. Interesting. I suppose what I find difficult is this resilient notion that ‘I’ could have been different (I could have been richer, poorer, blacker, whiter, taller, shorter, Welsh), and I feel a kind of psychological resistance to the idea that if I had been born shorter, I wouldn’t have been ‘me-but-shorter’, I wouldn’t even have been born ‘someone else’; ‘I’ wouldn’t have been born at all.

The personal history that Xoc mentions is interesting also, in that there does feel (to me) to be a kind of psychological continuity despite the enormous flux and development that has happened in my mind and body over the years. And it doesn’t feel like that’s just down to memory. I don’t really believe in souls, but I imagine that that continued meness in the face of great physical and psychological change is what believers in souls are talking about. Although I could well be wrong about that.
So I find it hard to say to what extent, and in what way, the 5-year-old Smoothly (whose angelic face stares out from the photos thread somewhere) and the grizzly old vizog that now presents itself are the same person. In not much of a way at all it seems. I probably have more in common with you than I do with him. Which in turn makes me wonder why I should be paying money into a pension, rather than, say, giving it to you…

semioticrobotic

13:23 / 14.06.05

Consciousness of Self is encounter with Other; the Self is a product of Self-Other relations.

As a human being (a biological entity), you were born. As someone trying to be human (the perpetual construction) -- that is, trying to be an "I" -- well, that's something that's ongoing, always in flux.

13:27 / 14.06.05

I feel a kind of psychological resistance

yeah.
thats what i meant about seeing us as less 'human'.
i mean human in the sense our western tradition has seen it over the years; special, blessed, magical, the reason for all existence.
we are organic machines and our wiring makes us who we are.
change our wiring and we are different.
like if you put an intel in an apple.
it could still be 'the same', but you know it would run a bit differently.

13:28 / 14.06.05

Which in turn makes me wonder why I should be paying money into a pension, rather than, say, giving it to you…

would you like help setting up a control experiment?

13:30 / 14.06.05

Bryan, how can the Self is a product of Self-Other relations ? If there are Self-Other relations, there’s already a Self. No? I can see how an *awareness* of self could come from such a relation (or an awareness of such a relation) though.

As a human being (a biological entity), you were born. As someone trying to be human (the perpetual construction) -- that is, trying to be an "I" -- well, that's something that's ongoing, always in flux.

How does the biological entity relate to ‘me’? The problem, for me, with the flux thing is that it doesn’t really account for why I care more about my future well-being than I do about your future well-being (which I’m afraid I do, no offence).

13:31 / 14.06.05

Grammatically, 'I' (and 'you') are really anomalous words because their referent (the person they designate) changes depending on who speaks them. (Someone who knows more about the history of linguistics/semiology than me might be able to go into this a bit more - I think Emile Benveniste is the guy who talked most about this idea.) So the thing that unifies 'you' (or rather your 'I'), the thing that means 'I' can refer both to 30yoSmoothly and 5yo Smoothly, is your own existence as a linguistic and social subject. I think there are some psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia would be the classic example) which are characterized precisely by not inhabiting a unifying 'I'. So that might be another set of things to think about.

I guess what I mean is that 'I' is like a character in a story. They don't have an existence outside all the textual instances of their appearance - the question "Is Hamlet gay?" is kind of meaningless because Hamlet doesn't have a sexuality which pre-exists his appearance in the play and which is being expressed in the play. Similarly 'I' is a moment-by-moment projection by me of all the experiences I have had, which are linked together though certain learned (or possibly innate) mechanisms - in particular, narrative and the idea of a 'life story'. It's possible to imagine cultures or languages which organize the idea of the 'I' differently (the borg on Star Trek, with their hive mind, would be an example).

This is pretty scattered, but maybe some of it is useful/interesting...

13:35 / 14.06.05

toksik, I think there’s a possibility as I see Being as too binary. Either I am or I’m not, alive or dead. But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. But like you said at the beginning, another sperm/egg mix would have been another person. I assume you mean another, not just different (if you see the distinction I’m trying to make)

13:38 / 14.06.05

'Scattered' is exactly what I'm looking for, TBH Deva. I'm just trying to fumble around and work out what I'm thinking about, if that makes any sense. Will get back to you on that.

13:49 / 14.06.05

i'm not sure i do...
i think i do.
i meant if on the same day and at the same time as you were concieved another sperm had won the great race, you would not be you.
you would be someone else.
i think you'd prolly be similar if not indistinguishable in many ways, but not the same.

semioticrobotic

13:58 / 14.06.05

Bryan, how can the Self is a product of Self-Other relations ? If there are Self-Other relations, there’s already a Self. No? I can see how an *awareness* of self could come from such a relation (or an awareness of such a relation) though.

I understand, Smoothly. There's a bit of a start-stop, which-came-first hurdle to surmount if this is to work. The problem, I think, is one of solidarity -- how is the self perpetual beneath our awareness of it? Is it? Does the Self only exist as an experience in conjuntion with Otherness, or does it persist somewhere else, somewhere beneath all that?

(I think that binary is a bit too restrictive and delimiting, by the way, but for the sake of the conversation, I wanted to throw it out there.)

G.H. Mead is the one who makes a big distinction between "I" as personal and "me" as social -- "me" being the social construction of the Self outside the Self.

How does the biological entity relate to ‘me’? The problem, for me, with the flux thing is that it doesn’t really account for why I care more about my future well-being than I do about your future well-being (which I’m afraid I do, no offence).

In The Social Body, Nick Crossley says all desire is a desire to be desired. In effect, we're all aware that a knowledge of ourselves is accessible only through discourse -- and since we're always working on knowing ourselves, you're always working on relatedness/relations. This is to say: an intimate knowledge of Other is our window to the Self.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:07 / 14.06.05

Well, in what sense? You might have been given the same name, you would probably have been raised in a similar fashion, but the fact that you were different, as a result of any number of factors about how the genetic material carried by sperm and egg is compiled into a person, would make everything different, increasingly so. So, you could map a pattern of difference radiating out and further away from the "you" that you are, as different interactions of self and other, where other is different people and different environment.

Except of course you couldn't, because you wouldn't exist, and nor would the concept of you. Which is, I think, where the idea of odds deflates somewhat. There are probabilistic representations available of what a particular sperm-egg combo will do, whether that product will be born with or without eyes or limbs or a heart, whether it is crippled by polio, but these aren't about selecting a self but about creating one. So, the entity emerging from Ma Smoothly takes another half an hour to come out but continues to be the child of Ma Smoothly. The potentialities that lead precisely to you never occur, so precisely-you never exists.

As such, the probability that you exist is just about exactly the same as the probability that any number of other yous might have existed - insanely improbable in terms of the cumulative likelihood of everything happening as it did, but entirely unremarkable because everything did happen as it did. How different things would have to be before a hypothetical precisely-you would extend a non-existent finger and declare "that is no longer me" is a bit of a trickier question - some cataclysmic event tonight might make you tomorrow significantly different from you-so the causal continuity of your understanding of yourself cuts different expressions of that self a degree of slack.

Mind you, I don't really believe in the self, so that may all be entirely off.

14:33 / 14.06.05

Sorry, not enough time to attend to all these points right now (Work: the curse of the barbelling classes). But I think this - Mind you, I don't really believe in the self - might be one of the things I’ve been grappling towards. But I’m not sure. Will think.

15:05 / 14.06.05

I think a Smoothly born shorter wouldn't have been Smoothly. That would have been someone called Shorty who might or might not have shared some characteristics with Smoothly, although as Haus points out, since Smoothly would never have existed, who would have known?

As for Memory and Self, I used to work with people who had lost all or some of their memory. People who have only childhood memories left behave like children. They identify their Self as the child they once were, or a simulacrum of that Self composed of what memory they retain of that manifestation of the Self. So maybe that young Smoothly in the photograph is still there, underneath the layers of varnish your Self has acquired.

People who have lost even those residual long term memories have also lost much of the ability to express anything intelligibly. Hard to know what sort of Self they might perceive. That Self responds to sensation but has no memory of family or personal history. Relatives would say to me, "It's not her, she's gone". Their perception was that the Self had already died because the recognisably personal cues were absent. I think the Self is still there but changed and limited in expression.

19:02 / 14.06.05

Then, I happened to be born into a peculiar set of social and economic circumstances, in a specific part of the world, at a certain time, and was thereafter subject to a rich pageant of formative (and personal) experiences.

Using this as a springboard, I would suggest that your concept of self cannot in fact transcend these things. You could have been born with exactly the same genetic material, but into an entirely different context, and your sense of self would be something entirely different. The different ‘you’s that resulted might not recognise each other. So in response to “is that a meaningful question?”, my answer would be no. The self you are aware of is entirely context-bound.

So you may notice I’ve done a complete U-turn since I last spoke to you on the subject. Not sure if my belief in the soul has changed at all, but that’s more a matter of whether we exist apart from our bodies, rather than whether we exist with a fixed identity.

At the end of the day, you are you, and you’re a dude. So don’t worry too much about it.

22:00 / 14.06.05

apparently, most sperm don't bother going for the egg, they defend it against other sperm. so the one that made it is a true champion - the point is that, while there were a ridiculously large number of the little blighters, there was a vanishingly small no. that had any real chance at hitting bullseye - but yes, any other one would have produced a different smoothly. a 'roughly', shall we say!

as for your self, credit the frontal lobes. that is what makes you you. they play the critical executive role and determine what aspects of brain function and stimuli are 'relevant to you', and if you lose them you don't know you did! (as opposed to manifold other brain lesions and damage, where often the 'you' is painfully aware of the deficit.

other than that, it is a bit like, if the big bang had been a teensy bit different, would life has arisen? moot point; we wouldn't be here to ask! praise be to jah denfield, eh?

btw glad you are smoothly, smoothly

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

09:15 / 15.06.05

Mind you, I don't really believe in the self, so that may all be entirely off.

'Me' too...'I' is a first-person, singular pronoun, and apart from that so dubious as far as actual verifiable existence goes, that it is an open challenge to anyone to actually demonstrate such a thing really is there.

As a convention of language to facilitate easy communication it's handy, sure, but it has a rather tricksy habit of convincingly deluding the user that it is more than that, and 'really' exists - somewhere - 'inside'. And boy, can it ever divide if it makes the common seeker's hobby of scrutinising it's own nature...as in

There was a young man who said 'Though
it appears that I know that I know,
what I'd most like to see
is the I that knows Me,
when I know that I know that I know'.

There's loads of good info about this subject in the Indian system known as Advaita, which means 'There is not two' (Self/Other, Organism/Environment, Short/Long, Dark/Light, Mind/Matter, Space/Solid, Fish/Cakes - all one thing always and already arising as one thing, the division being a false but useful (if you have to live in it) illusion).

Highly recommend reading UG Krishnamurti if you're interested. All his stuff is free, no copyright, available online. Read 'Mind is Myth' and 'The Mystique of Enlightenment' (which he now denounces completely and calls 'The Mistake of Enlightenment', regretting that he ever agreed to let the transcriber record what he had to say...interesting fellow, sounds like a right gnarly old geezer, I'd love to meet him).

12:58 / 15.06.05

A couple of quick thoughts: We do seem to have at least a *sense* of self, even if its ontological status is moot. And my sense of self is discrete and differentiated from yours (as Bryan says, perhaps even created out of that contrast. Which makes me wonder how isolation from other selves would affect this sense, and also how this all creates a sense of ownership over one’s extended self – how we relate to our bodies and where we draw the line where self ends and otherness begins… but that’s a digression to far for me for now). Thing is, if this sense of self rests on memory, and a narrative life-story, then at best one’s sense of self is a very fragile thing indeed. It would appear to be much easier to kill the self than kill the body (and how a single body could be a vehicle for a series of distinct selves) which I’d not really thought about before.
It also occurs to me that it makes a nonsense of any notion of reincarnation of any sort, as I understand it. How would it even make sense to say that I have had previous lives of which I have no contiguous memory. Do any Templists have a view on this?

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

18:11 / 16.06.05

Ah, but *who* exactly has a sense of *who*?

You say 'I have a sense of self', but how much more tautological can you get? Self is a third person description of I, is it not? Who is this third person? Talk about multiple personality disorder (cue Ganesh).

I have a sense of I. Well, duh. I am that I am. Congratulations.

This is the 'problem' with dualistic thought...It posits a self which is something other than another thought, an 'owner' somehow, of thoughts, which exists in their absence, continuous, cohesive, that has temporal continuity rather than simply another thought which blossoms into existence with every single thought...There *seems* to be a 'conductor' of the thoughts and thinking process, but this conductor is itself another part of that process, it has no reality outside, though it likes to pretend that it does. If you stop thinking about it, 'you' cease to exist.

It cannot be thought about, because it is the thinker. Like using a torch to search for your torch in the dark, there is a fundamental Duh going on. Reach for your hands...Look at your eyes...Taste your tongue...what do your ears sound like?

And so on down the wanky Zen path...

05:28 / 17.06.05

It cannot be thought about, because it is the thinker. Like using a torch to search for your torch in the dark,

ah, moneyshot, you have not heard of mirrors? the capacity for self-reflection seesm to be one reserved for creatures, like us, with evolved frontotemporal lobes that do, in deed, act like the conductor, or ceo. sure, they are part of the system but can reflect on their own role - as any ceo must!

i agree, that talk like 'i can get a sense of me' seems tautological, but there is a manner of speaking being employed beacuse the folk understanding of the concepts haven't developed enough for there to be a vernacular to address this lexical hole. what it is saying is the frontal cortex 'i' is getting a sense of the 'the whole self/human/organism', without being dualist at all....

well, that's how i see it!

and roughly smoothly's [hello!] point about killing the self is a good one, as i mentioned above. neurological damage affecting these frontal cortex regions often results in the person not having any awareness that 'they' have gone - their capacity to self-reflect is lost, so they lose something of that 'i'... whereas damage to other neurological areas can leave the intact 'self' quite devastatingly aware of their deficiency.

i know that 'self' is a construct, but there must be a brain in the organism that has the capacity to reflect on itself to construct this construct, from its unique experiences. isn't the denial of that