Well, there's a scary side thought: electricity is measured in pulses or cycles, right? I mean, it has a *frequency*. Which means it's turning on and turning off *all the time*, just lots of times a second. (In normal brains, it's between 6 and 12 times a second, I think).
What if you're a new person every time a cycle is completed?
Here's an example of what I mean: "persistence of vision." It's how film works. A movie (whether a film or a video) is basically a series of still pictures shown very quickly all in a row. The movement we see is imaginary - it takes place in the space between the pictures. Little pulses of awareness at 24 frames per second (or in video 30 fps). Dirty Harry never fires his Magnum. We only see cross sections of the act of firing. Our brains, however, instinctually - or, to be more precise, pre-instinctually - fill in the blanks, so we see the finger move on the trigger and the gun jerk back in his hand. Persistence of vision.
They tried to use the phenomenon to sneak in ads, you know, subliminally, so our perceptions would be altered without us noticing it. It didn't work so well. Like a skip on a CD - too sudden a change has to get re-read as interference, because our brains want that pre-existing vision (the motion picture narrative) to continue.
So the brain is flickering all the time like a movie screen, and the mind is always filling in the blanks, giving an illusion of a fluid, ongoing perceiver made up of a sequence of flashes of perception. I think it can be argued that memory is the main tool the mind uses to create this illusion of a linear, continuous self, by giving us a continuum of past perceptions to draw from. I'm not saying memory is the Self, but that it's one of the main tools the Self uses to create itself.
In other words, in the time it takes me to write this sentence, I've been at least (6 Hz x 30 sec) 180 different people, all operating under the illusion that I'm this guy named grant. |
