Yet there is something that is the same in all possible worlds. Perhaps it is something like the DNA. — schopenhauer1

You are trapping yourself into paradox by a logic which insists that identity is about a definable essence or atomic set of facts. Identity is understood in a positive sense as an irreducible "something".

But that is a good argument for instead understanding the issue of identity from a process or probabilistic point of view. That is, identity is defined in an open-ended fashion as a constraint on difference rather than a constitution of similarity.

If you pin your categorisation of "Schop" on a notion of absolute similarity - some unchanging essence - then there is no way to handle exceptions to the rule. Differences will always matter. And so you wind up with the usual paradoxes of thought.

But if instead you take a constraints based approach - a family resemblance, fuzzy set, Bayesian, or a 100 other such implementations of a probabilistic ontology - then the assumption is that there are always differences. Similarity doesn't truly exist. However constraint does exist to distinguish between the differences that make a difference vs the differences that don't make a difference.

Identity then becomes a thread of being defined by a general persistence rather than a specific existence. "Schop" becomes a historically-constrained process that gathers specificity by memory and habit. The identity becomes sharp as the Schop process becomes more and more discriminating about the differences that make a difference to it, versus the differences that don't make a difference to it.

In an "all possible worlds" setting, Schop cuts his nails this morning in one, and Schop cut his nails tomorrow in another. That's a difference. But it doesn't make any particular difference.

And then will be an infinity of worlds in which Schop is cutting his nails at 10.08am precisely this morning, yet every act of clipping is fractionally dissimilar. Differences can't be eliminated as nothing can ever be exactly similar in this life. (Quantum mechanics tells us this is true on the microscale. LaPlacean determinism is ruled out by quantum indeterminism.) Yet also we can see that these infinite fractional differences concerning the historically-constrained identity of "10.08am nail clipping Schop" are differences that really fail to make an essential difference.

So that leaves the question of the differences that do make a difference to Schop as an ongoing process - a developing story of increasingly specified constraint on possibility. A sense of identity is what grows by an accumulation of experiences. Or in other words, an accumulation of habits of discrimination.

Schop starts as a mindless blob - a fertilised ovum. Schop is born - some world of events begins to interact with some set of genetically-coded constraints. Schop becomes a boy and then a man - a history accumulates, habits are formed, memories are made - that increasingly reduce the space of "could have beens" which might count as differences that would have made a difference.

I also want to add, that the implication is that there is no being born "as something else". You could only have been born as you. — schopenhauer1

So you are trapping yourself into a false binary here. Even at the moment of birth, there are all the differences that wouldn't have made a difference as well as all the differences that would have.

The definition of "you" - that assertion of identity - has to be a logically fault-tolerant to apply to the real world. Otherwise you have a logic that only generates paradox.

Identity boils down similarity defined as a limit on difference. Something is essentially the same if it fails to be meaningfully different. That is why exceptions can prove the rule - they demonstrate that there is a constraint in play which is the bit that is unmoved by the accidental.

But the constraints are nothing mystical. They simply are the fact of a developmental history, a process of habit and memory accumulation. They are the information - the capacity for making discriminations - encoded in your genes, your neurons, your habits of thought.

Identity is usually taken in logic to mean absolute similarity. But in reality, identity is only constituted by a relative absence of significant difference. In nature, there is always difference. But also, by the same token, indifference.

It is like they say about the river. You never step into the same river twice. Yet it is also always the same river ... for all practical purposes. Every H2O molecule is a different one today from the ones yesterday. No ripple of turbulence is a mirror of the day before. But the differences don't matter a damn. They blur away into the enduring generality that is the probabilistic or macro view of that river.

@schopenhauer1 I think what you’re trying to get at is the relationship of consciousness and experience. The “you” you’re referring to is essentially this, a particular consciousness experiencing a particular environment with particular DNA. If I’m right, then I agree with you. But it depends on what you mean by being a different being. If you’re asking whether or not a being could be born of different parents, in different circumstances, location, time, etc. with different DNA than you, yet retain your consciousness, the answer is no. Your consciousness (and therefore your identity) is entirely dependent on your DNA and your environment. However, if you mean could I, literally, with the exact same DNA and consciousness have been born in a different time and under different circumstances, then the answer is yes, theoretically.

Have you considered Schopenhauer's position here? He was one of those who realized (correctly, in my opinion) that there is only one universal self or experiencer, and that it occupies all perspectives. "Occupies" is a bad choice of word though really, since it isn't that there is something separate from the world that is somehow inserted into it to experience it. Rather, this one universal experiencer is the very world itself.

The way you are thinking about this matter suggests that there are a number of separate and discrete selves in the world. There are not. If you analyze it, any notion of true individual selves, whether soul-based as in Christian metaphysics, or materialist, falls apart. It just doesn't work.

I'd have to dig in Schop's writings to find a passage that expresses the sort of view I am attributing to him, and I'm feeling lazy at the moment. I don't remember where to look exactly. Maybe later.

Much of what I'll say here isn't from Schopenhauer.

It isn't that you could not have been someone else. Instead, you, the real you, the very base-level experiencer, the universal self, actually are all people and all things at all times. It is not that John is Joe. No, that would be silly. That suggests that inside Joe is a little John. Rather, the universal self is John and is also Joe. You are both them at the same time, but separately in a sense.

When we think that what we fundamentally are, what our true identity is, is this particular body and personality, we make a mistake. If that's what you think you are, then of course that could not have been anyone else. But that's not what you, the one experiencing this, really are. You are all of it and also beyond all of it, "it" being the stuff in the world.

This isn't solipsism. In solipsism, it is as if one individual human perspective is the only real one and everything that is an object for that mind is merely that, with no other people actually having their own subjectivity. No, this view I am talking about involves there being subjectivity everywhere, but with all this subjectivity actually being one, there really being only one subject, one that is everywhere. But it isn't that it is spread over space. At the level of the subject, location simply doesn't make any sense.

Location only shows up as a feature of the contents of experience. It is part of how experience is structured. It doesn't apply to the experiencer itself.

The reason we fail to see that we are experiencing everything is that information isn't integrated in such a way that we can know that we are seeing through the eyes of both John and Joe at the same time. Joe's brain contains no memories of being John. And John's brain contains no memories of being Joe. It is a little like an amnesiac who can move between several rooms, but who only has a chalkboard in each room to record and remember experiences he has in that room only. He lacks a way of moving information from one room to another to integrate it all and realize that he occupies multiple rooms. While in room A, he has no memories of ever having been in room B.

Information works according to the laws of physics and is local. There are differences and distinctions. One "person", one body in the world, is distinguished from another. Basically what makes it up is a collection of such distinctions. It is all the ways in which it is different. Information, in Bateson's words, is "a difference that makes a difference". Matter is information. Form is information. What is experienced is information. But the experiencer is not information. The experiencer is never an object. Information and the laws that govern it belong to the contents of experience. The subject itself has no differences and is not a content of experience. A rock can be "this, but not that" or "here, not there", but such distinctions do not apply to the ground-level "I".

I suppose that it might make sense to say that when we think, "I am (insert your name)," we are not wholly incorrect. It is the exclusivity of that identification that is mistaken.

I keep bringing this up when people ask “would you rather not have been born”? There is no situation in which I get to choose between existing and not existing, because that would require me existing to choose.

I can get behind some sort of “experiencer” being in everyone but I don’t get how it is “universal”. I never got “universal self” even though I hear it here and there. It would make sense to me to say that everyone’s consciousness/experiencer operates in the same way or that everyone has an identical copy of it but it doesn’t make sense to me to say that everyone’s consciousness is literally the same one and only “universal consciousness”. Why do we experience different things then?

Why do we experience different things then? — khaled

When you ask why "we" experience different things, this still sounds like it assumes multiple experiencers. Experiencer A experiences X and experiencer B experiences Y. There are not multiple experiencers. Rather, the one experiencer experiences both X and Y. Let's say that X is the experience of being "me" and Y is the experience of being "you". The one experiencer experiences both X and Y at the same time.

But why don't we know that we are both? That's what seems to beg for explanation. If you are also me, why don't you know it? The answer lies in information integration, or a lack thereof, as I noted earlier. It is a matter of what information is accessible at a given location. In your brain, the one experiencer simply has no access to the memories in another brain. The memories in this other brain are instead over here, and are accessed by the one experiencer here in this brain, not there in that one. The one experiencer has access to those memories only at that location. It doesn't have access to both sets of memories in one brain. In order for that to happen, your brain would somehow have to contain the memories of two brains.

What I am getting at might start to make more sense when we bring time into this. Consider that you intuitively think that the one experiencing being you now is the same one that experienced being you five seconds ago. Why does this seem to be the case? It is because you remember. Your current brain state contains information about those past brain states. But your earlier brain state did not similarly contain information about this current one. In it, there was no sense of being the current you in the same way you now feel that you were once it. There is a sense in which you know your identity with your past body-self while not feeling the same way about your future body-self. You have no memories of your future brain states. Causation does not work that way. So there is a temporal asymmetry.

When you reach out in your mind for knowledge of your past self, memories come. When you reach out for knowledge of your future self, you come up empty. Similarly, when you reach out for knowledge about what it is like to be me, you come up empty, and for a similar reason. In both these empty-handed cases, you lack the knowledge because information does not flow that way. Despite this lack of information, that which experiences being you now is identical with that which experiences being you a minute from now. And similarly, despite the lack of information in your brain about my brain state, that which experiences your brain state is identical with that which experiences mine.

That which has the experiences is one. The seeming rift between the two experiences is a result of the fact that nowhere is the information in both brains being integrated in a significant way. There is no experience that takes the form of such an integration.

Consider the amnesiac I mentioned earlier. Let's call him Bob. He can't remember anything from one minute to the next. We place him in a room and have him make notes on a chalkboard in that room about what he experiences. We show him things. He makes notes. We then ask him questions. He consults the board and tells us what he has seen. This chalkboard is his memory. But suppose we move him to a different room with another chalkboard, let's call it room B, the first room being room A. In room B, we show him different things and he makes different notes. But if we ask him about things he experienced in room A, he comes up empty-handed. In room B, he simply lacks access to information about experiences in room B. But the critical point of this scenario is that Bob's inability to integrate information between the two rooms is not evidence of two distinct experiencers. The experiences in both rooms are had by the same guy. But neither of the rooms contains information about what was experienced in the other.

Our two brains are analogous to these two rooms. The difference is that the subject experiencing both of them isn't moving from one to the other. It experiences them both perhaps simultaneously. It just lacks a way of fully integrating the two. These two brains would have to be tied together as part of a bigger brain or some such in order for that kind of integration to happen.

There might be somewhere in the world or in time where the experience of being your brain and the experience of being mine get integrated and there is knowledge and memory of both at the same time in basically the same place. Consider Bob again. We have rooms A and B with their limitations. But suppose that room A and room B both contain cameras fixed on their chalkboards and this video from both rooms is then fed to a screen in a third room, C. If we take Bob to room C, from this vantage point, he "remembers" everything he saw in both room A and room B! But if we take him back to room B, he knows nothing of room A or room C. So from A, he knows only A. From B, he knows only B. From C, he knows A and B. He can report experiences had in A from either A or C, but not from room B.

It could be that in the future, through some advanced technology, our brains will be linked together, and an experience might then be had of my memories being integrated with yours and of the seeming difference between our identities dissolving. What would that feel like? I don't know! It surely wouldn't feel like there are two distinct subjects uncomfortably occupying the same double-brain. Maybe there would be a sense of realizing that there had never been two separate subjects in the first place.

There is some level of integration happening between our brains though right now just because of communication and other forms of physical causation where we impact one another. So, in this brain, I have access to a little information about your brain state. But the bandwidth is very low!

It is hard to imagine that one subject could be experiencing multiple perspectives at once without "knowing" it until you really digest this idea of information integration or lack thereof.

Returning to your question:

Why do we experience different things then? — khaled

"We" don't. In reality, there is no "we", if by that we mean a plurality of subjects. And there is really just one big experience that includes the lives of everyone and everything. That experience has a certain structure, this structure reflecting the laws of physics and information and logic. The form of this experience is such that some parts of it simply don't refer to some other parts, and that's all the seeming gulf between us really amounts to.

The truly hard thing to explain is something hard to explain no matter what stance you take metaphysically, and that is why there are differences in the world at all, why there are many things, why there is form at all, why there is "something" instead of nothing, why there is broken symmetry, why there is information. It is the great problem of the one and the many. I don't know quite how to approach it. But I sometimes suspect that if things are seen sub specie aeternitatis, or under the aspect of eternity, there is perhaps no broken symmetry at all. At the level of the whole, seen from no particular perspective, perhaps there is NOT something rather than nothing. Maybe it is really nothing. Maybe taken all together at the same time, every pair of opposites cancels and there is no form whatsoever. The whole of everything, after all, is not related to anything else. Form implies relation and relations belong only to parts. Maybe it only seems like there is something "from the inside" so to speak, when the whole is seen from a partial perspective. Maybe the world is almost a kind of delusion, a case of cosmic dissociative identity disorder.

*shrugs*

Without going to great lengths, I don't know how to convince you that there is just one universal subject. I arrived at that position after thinking fairly intensely for a long time about a lot of issues. It solved a whole bunch of problems in one fell swoop. It is the only answer that really works, as far as I can tell. When it dawned on me, many things suddenly fit together and clicked. I don't have much doubt about it any longer. Some questions and puzzles remain, but this position minimizes them. To try to communicate the way it all sits in my mind though would be a daunting task. It would almost require me to put you through a similar history of thinking. I would have to get you to feel the weight of a bunch of other philosophical problems and then show how this idea solves them all neatly.

I get frustrated because no matter how I present the position in a forum post, it just sounds weird or silly, probably because it is such a counter-intuitive idea. I despair of the fact that to really get it across in a remotely convincing way would probably take a book.

I think what you’re trying to get at is the relationship of consciousness and experience. The “you” you’re referring to is essentially this, a particular consciousness experiencing a particular environment with particular DNA. If I’m right, then I agree with you. But it depends on what you mean by being a different being. If you’re asking whether or not a being could be born of different parents, in different circumstances, location, time, etc. with different DNA than you, yet retain your consciousness, the answer is no. Your consciousness (and therefore your identity) is entirely dependent on your DNA and your environment. — Pinprick

Yes, you often misconstrue my antinatalist arguments, but this is a good representation of what I mean.

However, if you mean could I, literally, with the exact same DNA and consciousness have been born in a different time and under different circumstances, then the answer is yes, theoretically. — Pinprick

Yes, there could not have been a you with a different set of circumstances. You would not be you.


So my main point is that this development of blurry identity is only going to happen once. There is no you except you. You could not have been another being. Your interaction and genes are yours. That combination would could not have been something else. Unlike contingencies of different outcomes in a life, that life itself could not have been contingently different, without not being you anymore.


It is true Schopenhauer was an idealist of sorts. That is to say, he thought that Will which is the ground of existence, takes on form in a sort of "illusion" of the individual mind which projects space, time, and causality, which creates a sort of fake "representation". The mind is simply Will trying to strive to find some sort of resolution, that it doesn't get in the existence of the illusory representation. That's not necessarily my position, but I do find Schop's idea of Will as a striving principle in human motivations useful.

Unlike contingencies of different outcomes in a life, that life itself could not have been contingently different, without not being you anymore. — schopenhauer1

But still, when are you most truly you? At birth? At death? Somewhere in between even?

If every decision you make along the journey counts towards the final sum, then quite a different conclusion results from this fact of every step involving some counterfactual contingency.

Whether we believe our life has a purpose, or if it is essentially meaningless, doesn’t change the fact that we will develop a selfhood constituted of some collection of ingrained habits. The you-ness of you will be an accumulation of facts that you always had some kind of say in. And whether your choices were generally defeatist or generally entrepreneurial, doesn’t change the fact that “you” is what you are more towards the end than towards the beginning.

Commonsense would then agree with biology that perhaps the most “you” period is during your active maturity. The infant you is too unformed, too much a collection of open possibilities. The senescent you is too fixed, too stereotyped by habit, and so has lost something that was essentially you - a capacity for continuing personal growth.

The goldilocks years are maturity when there is a good balance of wise habits and fruitful learning still occurring. A mix of the determined and the contingent which meets the criteria for being “lively and mindful” from a biologist’s point of view.

There is no you prior to your birth that could have been something else. — schopenhauer1

Are you sure about this? Many children are born highly developed - Mozart, Picasso, child geniuses etc.

Are you sure about this? Many children are born highly developed - Mozart, Picasso, child geniuses etc. — EnPassant

And this means?

But still, when are you most truly you? At birth? At death? Somewhere in between even? — apokrisis

My arguments are not about how to identify identity. Rather, it is a sort of claim of causality. There could never be a situation where "you" were born otherwise as some other being. As stated in my last post. Yes, once born, I recognize and believe in the idea of contingency. One could do this, but did that instead, or this circumstance instead of that circumstance lead to different outcome which affects identity.

And this means? — schopenhauer1

It lends credibility to the idea that our spirits exist before we are born. It is clear that many children have highly developed characters at a very early age. This cannot easily be explained by physical science.

also lends credibility to genetic theory. Some people will just be born with the right genes for the right environment to be considered geniuses. There is no need for past lives or spirits to explain that. I tend to favor the metaphysics that “creates” the fewest things and makes sense. You don’t need spirits to explain differences in intelligence and performance so I don’t believe in them.

What problems are there with many individual bobs in many individual rooms rather than one universal Bob that somehow looks into all the rooms simultaneously yet doesn’t remember what’s in the other rooms. You say “he only know A fro A and B from B” but you also say “he is in A and B” so that would imply he knows both A and B. But he clearly doesn’t (because I don’t experience what you’re experiencing or I might have understood your view XD)

I can get behind everyone having an identical Bob but not everyone sharing a single Bob

I keep bringing this up when people ask “would you rather not have been born”? There is no situation in which I get to choose between existing and not existing, because that would require me existing to choose. — khaled

That is an implication you picked up on.

Some people will just be born with the right genes for the right environment to be considered geniuses. There is no need for past lives or spirits to explain that. I tend to favor the metaphysics that “creates” the fewest things and makes sense. You don’t need spirits to explain differences in intelligence and performance so I don’t believe in them. — khaled

It takes decades to develop character and some children are already born with highly developed characters - bad and good...

Tell me exactly what you mean by “character” and why you think it takes so long to develop. I don’t know what young Mozart was like so I don’t know what you think is so special about him that the only way to explain it is by saying he is some kind of “old soul” or something

Tell me exactly what you mean by “character” and why you think it takes so long to develop. I don’t know what young Mozart was like so I don’t know what you think is so special about him that the only way to explain it is by saying he is some kind of “old soul” or something — khaled

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/character

Mozart was a child genius. https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/pictures/composer/classical-musics-child-prodigies/mozart-child/

But still, when are you most truly you? At birth? At death? Somewhere in between even? — apokrisis

If we bring in social constructivism you can be born into a caste system within India and so be judged as a preexisting archetype. While in the US some think people should pay reparations for their ancestors owning slaves even though those were not individual choices.
My point here is that it's difficult to judge identity this way since social upheavals may bring greater degrees of freedom regardless of biological age.

Which comes to my next point:

The senescent you is too fixed, too stereotyped by habit, and so has lost something that was essentially you - a capacity for continuing personal growth. — apokrisis

It may seem so (through a glass darkly), but I sometimes wonder that developmental psychology is lifelong especially in the cyber age. Once someone can disguise certain characteristics they can become different people and develop new qualities. Though they may have always had that quality and it was simply dormant. And there is also the "grandmother hypothesis" which is a new role which nature is said to provide.
I don't know much about gerontology but it certainly deserves more PoM analysis. Especially in regard to Alzheimer's disease which I'm not sure has been dealt with properly.

Though there is always the intuition that "things are getting worse" as you age. Looking back that feeling it is likely due to reduced freedoms since most times, I just want a reset button like a video game.

:up:

You’re right about the grandmother hypothesis. My use of “senescent” is more technical here as it is a term that can be applied to biological systems in general - even ecosystems. And humans are different precisely because their developmental life cycle has been stretched right out so that they can be socially constructed as much as genetically preformed.

Homo erectus looks to have had no teenage stage, for instance. And it is very different that humans survive long past menopause - as if passing on social knowledge might be helpful.

The OP wants to fix the moment of birth as “everything” to make an antinatalist point. But the facts speak different.

Or at least we might say we had no choice to be born, and yet also, birth is itself the birth of a lifetime of choices that actually construct this “you”.

I would say you are taking your argument in a poor direction, the claim that someone can be born as someone else is made by an adult, the onus is on them to describe exactly how that might work. We do not need to identify when "you" becomes "you", all we need to do is say that "you" are a biological entity and that without being born, you wouldn't exist. That is a simple truth, all of this "soul" nonsense just makes things complicated.

none of what you are sending requires the existence of spirits. It could still be explained in terms of genetics and nurture. I don’t know why you think those two aren’t enough.

Also the definition of character that you sent:
“Qualities that make someone distinct from others”

Doesn’t take long to develop at all you already have qualities that make you distinct from birth.

I don’t think child geniuses are amazing to the point of requiring the existence of spirits that reincarnate with some of their “character” intact

none of what you are sending requires the existence of spirits. It could still be explained in terms of genetics and nurture. I don’t know why you think those two aren’t enough. — khaled

But can it be explained in terms of genetics and nurture? It hasn't been so the question of preexistence of our spirits is still open.

Doesn’t take long to develop at all you already have qualities that make you distinct from birth. — khaled

I have known children who have almost adult characters from an early age. Some children have a level of maturity that normally takes decades to arrive at.

What problems are there with many individual bobs in many individual rooms rather than one universal Bob — khaled

Maybe later. Addressing this matter in a satisfactory way would require some time and effort, and I am a little overwhelmed and unmotivated at the moment. Really, it probably should be handled in another thread. If I find the time and muster the will to try to lay out the arguments, I'll post a new thread and bring your attention to it.

In the meantime, if you are interested, the position I am basically advocating is called open individualism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism

There are a number of things to read here on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenIndividualism/wiki/reading

In a way, Kripke's Naming and Necessity might be informative here. — schopenhauer1

But you might not like the consequence. It's the proper name, as a rigid designator, that picks out the very same thing in each mooted possible world. So schopenhauer1 may have developed forma different ovum, had different parents, been born a year later, and so on; what remains constant is the designation, not the genetics.

Prove to me he meant for a rigid designator to point to a completely open or empty set.

What relevance is that?

What relevance is that? — Banno

That's your argument it seems.

I’m not saying the preexistence of spirits is impossible I’m saying we don’t nearly have enough evidence to assume it

I’m not saying the preexistence of spirits is impossible I’m saying we don’t nearly have enough evidence to assume it — khaled

Yes, I understand that. I'm just putting forward an observation that needs to be answered.