We have the concept of self continuity throughout our lives and believe that even though our bodies change, "we" remain their, locked inside of our bony cages. Why don't we challenge that belief today.
There is nothing about you that is not there in another human being or the environment. You are the bags of groceries that you've been eating all your life and now those bags have an identity associated with it? How preposterous is that idea? Can vegetables and amino acids really think that they need to go to work tomorrow at 9 A.M.
In my quest to understand what uniquely identifies persons, I found that there is nothing that is not reproducible except consciousness that you are in that body. Even if you had an identical twin, raised in the same conditions, your consciousness still remains isolated from your twin's and doesn't just float between the two bodies like physicalism would logically dictate. If consciousness is a pure function of physical matter, then twins should have the best chance of jumping bodies.
What else remains unique? Well the wavefunction in that space. You are N number of particles entangled with the environment and your consciousness is at the centre of this wavefunction probability space, observing. Observation shouldn't have been possible in the first place. As a person your identity just becomes the unique set of eigenvalues given a certain measurement. Those eigenvalues remain unique to you as a quantum system. But why should a consciousness emerge out of that? There seems to me no purpose for consciousness. A human system could perfectly interact with his surroundings dictated by the random outcome of quantum measurements. The question of self-identity, quantum entanglement, and consciousness then come under one single umbrella: what the hell is anything at all and why is it conscious in things that look like humans?
There is nothing about you that is not there in another human being or the environment. You are the bags of groceries that you've been eating all your life and now those bags have an identity associated with it? How preposterous is that idea? Can vegetables and amino acids really think that they need to go to work tomorrow at 9 A.M.
In my quest to understand what uniquely identifies persons, I found that there is nothing that is not reproducible except consciousness that you are in that body. Even if you had an identical twin, raised in the same conditions, your consciousness still remains isolated from your twin's and doesn't just float between the two bodies like physicalism would logically dictate. If consciousness is a pure function of physical matter, then twins should have the best chance of jumping bodies.
What else remains unique? Well the wavefunction in that space. You are N number of particles entangled with the environment and your consciousness is at the centre of this wavefunction probability space, observing. Observation shouldn't have been possible in the first place. As a person your identity just becomes the unique set of eigenvalues given a certain measurement. Those eigenvalues remain unique to you as a quantum system. But why should a consciousness emerge out of that? There seems to me no purpose for consciousness. A human system could perfectly interact with his surroundings dictated by the random outcome of quantum measurements. The question of self-identity, quantum entanglement, and consciousness then come under one single umbrella: what the hell is anything at all and why is it conscious in things that look like humans?
