If you’re driving a large vehicle it is much heavier than your brain, does this mean identifying with the tiny lump of flesh rather than the tons and tons of steel is a terrible mistake?
While I agree with your comment, I have an observation to make.
While driving a car, I found it quite useful to consider the car as an extended part of my body.
The same is true for spoons, knives and forks while eating.
It’s pretty mush how the brain treats any proper tool use. In fact, at the present moment I sort of consider the entire internet, including your brain, as part of my extended body. :p
There was this great set of experiments I read about long ago and vaguely remember. There was one with two rubber staffs you held crossed and one with a rubber hand someone hit with a hammer and one where you used VR visors to look through a camera behind your back and some stuff like that.
There is an IMMENSE flexibility in what senses and objects the human brain can include in it’s self image. Really fascinating area, love this kind of thing.
I don’t claim the division is perfect. There’s the extended phenotype, and all that jazz. However, the claim was about the “most natural place to draw a line between you and not-you”. Of course there is no perfect place to draw that line—so, a few fillings do not disturb the general thesis.
Assuming one has to draw a line, there will probably be a best place to draw it.
I think the assumption that one has to draw a line is arbitrary, like deciding what amount of market capitalization constitutes making a corporation “too big to fail” and what falls short of that, or deciding “when ‘life’ begins”. Such line-drawing exercises leave me thinking “Um...what?”
Uh huh. So: I care about my toenails less than my kidneys too. But the context from the post is whether people identify with anything other than their conscious mind—and the answer I was giving was of the form: yes, of course!!! Consciousness is like the PR department. If you think that is you then—in my book—you have made a basic and fundamental existential mistake.
A collection of my brain and 9 brain-sized blobs of empty space scattered throughout the universe is 90% empty space, that’s not an argument for identifying with empty space, or a sign that there is so much more to me than my brain.
I am heartened to see this good comment of yours upvoted, and that people have not been poisoned by the silliness (IMO) of your immediately preceding comments (one must agree they express a view unpopular around here, insofar as they are downvoted) against other comments of yours.
Your mind is surely at least 90% unconscious, most of the time.
Identifying with your conscious mind seems to be a terrible mistake to me. There is so much more to you than that.
If you’re driving a large vehicle it is much heavier than your brain, does this mean identifying with the tiny lump of flesh rather than the tons and tons of steel is a terrible mistake?
While I agree with your comment, I have an observation to make. While driving a car, I found it quite useful to consider the car as an extended part of my body. The same is true for spoons, knives and forks while eating.
It’s pretty mush how the brain treats any proper tool use. In fact, at the present moment I sort of consider the entire internet, including your brain, as part of my extended body. :p
There was this great set of experiments I read about long ago and vaguely remember. There was one with two rubber staffs you held crossed and one with a rubber hand someone hit with a hammer and one where you used VR visors to look through a camera behind your back and some stuff like that.
There is an IMMENSE flexibility in what senses and objects the human brain can include in it’s self image. Really fascinating area, love this kind of thing.
Also why you don’t touch people’s wheelchairs.
The most natural place to draw a line between you and not-you is at your boundary as a biological organism.
I disagree strongly and see no reason why you’d think that.
Have any fillings in your teeth?
I don’t claim the division is perfect. There’s the extended phenotype, and all that jazz. However, the claim was about the “most natural place to draw a line between you and not-you”. Of course there is no perfect place to draw that line—so, a few fillings do not disturb the general thesis.
Assuming one has to draw a line, there will probably be a best place to draw it.
I think the assumption that one has to draw a line is arbitrary, like deciding what amount of market capitalization constitutes making a corporation “too big to fail” and what falls short of that, or deciding “when ‘life’ begins”. Such line-drawing exercises leave me thinking “Um...what?”
Uh huh. So: I care about my toenails less than my kidneys too. But the context from the post is whether people identify with anything other than their conscious mind—and the answer I was giving was of the form: yes, of course!!! Consciousness is like the PR department. If you think that is you then—in my book—you have made a basic and fundamental existential mistake.
A collection of my brain and 9 brain-sized blobs of empty space scattered throughout the universe is 90% empty space, that’s not an argument for identifying with empty space, or a sign that there is so much more to me than my brain.
Sure—I never made any such argument.
Your unconscious mind receives your sensory input and affects your actions—whereas empty space does not.
I am heartened to see this good comment of yours upvoted, and that people have not been poisoned by the silliness (IMO) of your immediately preceding comments (one must agree they express a view unpopular around here, insofar as they are downvoted) against other comments of yours.
I like LW.
I don’t currently agree, but I’m curious about your intuitions. Why does it seem like a mistake to you?
I assumed you meant “identifying only with ..”.
Not sure why you got downvoted.