(2025-01-23, 06:29 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: From one of Arvan's papers on P2P Simulation Hypothesis:
Quote: Wrote:As Melchert nicely summarizes Wittgenstein’s view:
Quote: Wrote:[Wittgenstein] suggests that if you wrote a book called The World as I Found it, there is one thing that would not be mentioned in it: you. It would include all of the facts you found, including all the facts about your body. And it would include psychological facts about yourself as well: your character, personality, dispositions, and so on. But you – the subject, the one to whom all this appears, the one who finds all these facts – would not be found.
Or, as Wittengstein put it in his own words, “The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.”
Quote: Wrote:Kant expressed a similar position– for example, “we cannot even say that this [the “I”/the self] is a concept, but only that it is a bare consciousness which accompanies all concepts.”
For Kant, each of us is ultimately a noumenal, unknowable “thing in itself.”36 The self is, “merely that unknown X to whom the world appears and by which it is structured into objects.”37 This is why it seems perfectly conceivable that someone else – some other subject of conscious experience – could wake up tomorrow in my bed with all of my personality traits, memories, beliefs, etc., and still not be me. I seem to be a simple, brute subject of experience, distinct from all particular psychological or physical facts. A perfect duplicate of me could fail to be me precisely because we can imagine “my consciousness”38 flickering off and replaced by a duplicate consciousness: some other subject having all of my physical and psychological properties. This is, at least, what many great minds (e.g. Kant, Wittgenstein, Butler, Reid, Chisholm, etc.) have thought.
Fascinating food for thought! Cheers.
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(2025-01-23, 06:29 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: This does seem to suggest that the Experiencer as Person is fundamentally distinct from Experience?
On the surface, yes... but I believe that Kant is missing something here ~ the nature of the Subject, the Experiencer, and how each will be differently defined by the exact same set of Experiences. That is to say, despite identical Experiences, our irreducibly distinct personalities still mean we interpret the same set differently.
So, in essence, Experience still cannot be separated from the Experiencer proper ~ because even if we duplicated, say, me, that duplicated would not be me. In essence, our Experiences would not be identical because we perceive them differently. That is, we are defined differently by the same Experiences because we are different Subjects.
So, I both agree with Kant, but also disagree. It's a complex subject, to be certain.
(2025-01-23, 06:29 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: In which case the Experiencer / Experienced Dualism seems to be true in some sense? Admittedly this doesn't by necessity mean they are of distinct substances.
In some sense, yes ~ if only because we... "artificially" (for want of a better descriptor...) create that distinction through sensory awareness. We the Experiencer are the ones who draw the lines between Self and Other.
(2025-01-23, 06:29 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: Perhaps, given the mystery of how exactly the causal ordering that provides Structure fits in, this is the best we can do with metaphysics?
I am uncertain... but at the moment I still find myself deferring to Taoism with its seeming structure of Emptiness -> Oneness -> Dualism -> Pluralism. I get to have my cake and eat it too ~ sort of, if we're counting derived substances as substances that cannot be reduced lest they no longer conceptually exist.
(2025-01-23, 06:29 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: A sort of Impasse that falls somewhere on a "spectrum" between "hard" Idealism and "hard" Dualism?
A sort of... Duality within Monism / Non-Dualism, you might say?
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“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
~ Carl Jung
(This post was last modified: 2025-01-23, 11:15 PM by Valmar. Edited 1 time in total.)
~ Carl Jung