When I first considered this I was a youth and didn’t know about different types of identity or cognitive psychology.
I just wondered why ‘I’ think and why ‘I’ didn’t think the thoughts of somebody else.
I didn’t identify identity with continuity of memories: I wasn’t aware of the possibility to model idenitity that way.
My idea of “me” was intuitive. But it was sufficient abstract that it didn’t mean a continuity of personality. If it meant the identity of the abstract reasoning-process. The process doing the resoning just in the moment of my thoughts. Why did that process think (in/for) me and not (in/for) somebody else?
So you could say that the question was rather about the identity of that reasoning process. And maybe Skeptityke conceived of something along these lines. In any case because the imagined reasoning process is abstract it could as well think for somebody else. Why didn’t it appear to do so. It was a riddle I didn’t solve then.
The solution is quite easy in hindsight:
The abstract reasoning process doing my thinking has no identity. Identity is coupled to state and all state has been abstracted away. It could execute its processing on some other beings state and that being would
It is not the reasoning process which perceives itself reasoning it is the resoning process working on my memories and other transient state which causes the perception of some reasoning process going on.
See also Righting a Wrong Question which could be applied here as follows: Not “Why do I have identity” but “Why do I think I have identity”.
One could models the process that makes you and Brittney Spears as two different processes. Or you could view it as one process that moves the two states forward. In this sense you could say that you wake up as both but off course their brainstates don’t know about each others inner workings. If you undergo lobotomy or multiple personality disorder you would probably still identify with all the pieces even if they can’t (fully) communicate with each other. (Or rather the pieces would acknowledge their common origin and close ties they have with each other)
When I first considered this I was a youth and didn’t know about different types of identity or cognitive psychology. I just wondered why ‘I’ think and why ‘I’ didn’t think the thoughts of somebody else. I didn’t identify identity with continuity of memories: I wasn’t aware of the possibility to model idenitity that way.
My idea of “me” was intuitive. But it was sufficient abstract that it didn’t mean a continuity of personality. If it meant the identity of the abstract reasoning-process. The process doing the resoning just in the moment of my thoughts. Why did that process think (in/for) me and not (in/for) somebody else?
So you could say that the question was rather about the identity of that reasoning process. And maybe Skeptityke conceived of something along these lines. In any case because the imagined reasoning process is abstract it could as well think for somebody else. Why didn’t it appear to do so. It was a riddle I didn’t solve then.
The solution is quite easy in hindsight: The abstract reasoning process doing my thinking has no identity. Identity is coupled to state and all state has been abstracted away. It could execute its processing on some other beings state and that being would
It is not the reasoning process which perceives itself reasoning it is the resoning process working on my memories and other transient state which causes the perception of some reasoning process going on.
See also Righting a Wrong Question which could be applied here as follows: Not “Why do I have identity” but “Why do I think I have identity”.
One could models the process that makes you and Brittney Spears as two different processes. Or you could view it as one process that moves the two states forward. In this sense you could say that you wake up as both but off course their brainstates don’t know about each others inner workings. If you undergo lobotomy or multiple personality disorder you would probably still identify with all the pieces even if they can’t (fully) communicate with each other. (Or rather the pieces would acknowledge their common origin and close ties they have with each other)