Arent we just a system of memories?

[Lord Jade Cross]

This has been running around my mind for a while now, especially after being present in a few funerals in the last year.

 

If we think about it, arent we, the ideas we identify as ego or personality just a system that reproduces memories trapped inside a body? 

 

Only when people seek comfort in the passing of someone do they say that the body becomes husk and that the important thing is the memory of that person. So if we call the body merely a husk when a person passes away, is it not a prison when they are alive? And do we really love a person in physical form or is it just that we merely identify their bodies much like we use names as conveniences but what we really mean is the concept of them, the memory in other words,

[Miss Anne Thrope]

This is an interesting philosophical idea. I think that most people would agree that if one's mind were to somehow be transferred to a different body, that person would still be who they are.

 

However, I would argue that your physical body makes up at least a small part of who you are. If you were to put the same set of memories in two different bodies and put them in the same environment, I think that the two bodies would gradually become two different people. This is because different bodies have different hormone levels, sizes, and small - large differences in physical ability.

For real life examples of how the body influences the person, you could look at trans people before and after hormone treatment. Many trans men have found that they cry less and are in general less emotional after hormones, which in turn, subtly affects their personalities. Another example is evidence found from twin studies. There have been cases where identical twins who were raised separately had similar life experiences, such as number of marriages, the type of people they are attracted to, and career paths.

 

In the end though, I do think that a person is mostly made of their memories and life experiences.

[Podsnap]

None of us is very conscious. We think we are but in fact, unless and until you can control your brainwave functions and your autonomic nervous system, which is where all the important stuff is going on, you are mostly a zombie.

[orangecat]

Yes, and this is how education or alternatively, brainwash works. Education could be divided into two part, knowledge and views/value/preference.

Knowledge is something unchangeable, like maths, sciences. We all learn it, live in it through our experience in the real world. For example, fire is hot and could hurt you, so you remember it and no to touch it in the future and eventually you would want to know why its hot. This is knowledge.

 

Your school/family/community also "teach" you values in very young age. Value could affect a person on how to use the knowledge, use it a good way, or ignore it completely. Fire could use for cooking but also killing. People always say to me to get a boyfriend/girlfriend from a very young age..and I remember it. It was part of my memory I did felt awkward not to have one. I push myself into the "market" and I wasnt happy at all. People who were abused tend to be abusive or acting coward. What makes them like that? Could that have been their past experiences, or memories?

 

 I am not good at explaining stuff like this and I am not a pro in such issues. But I do think human is just a biological machine that works on how they react to past memory. 

[Framework_zero]

You can't avoid the physical reality of a concept, every one of us is, by definition, a dynamic system. Our memories are represented by our bodies since the brain code all the information that make someone a real person. But this body is in constant exchange with the enviroment, so in the end you can't define someone merely as the total sum of its parts, because there are no precise parts to begin with. We loose matter and energy all the time, and replace it to keep ourselves alive, to keep the system and it's information flowing. But, if you can't say someone is defined as a finite part of the universe, you still can define that person as a percentage of the universe, a system based on that percentage.

That keeps you wonder, what do we really see in others? the system, the concept, the percentage of the universe that creates a person, its memories? ... all of wich we are never really conscious about, because we only percieve it as the phenomenological consecuences that carries on, I mean, the cultural manifestations of its personality. That's all, the only we can really see about the complex system that a person is consists in his personality (and not even all of it, just the little part that makes self evident trough social interaction).

But if you think deeply, there is a component that classical materialism can't handle, mind philosophers call it 'qualia', and it's defined as the subjetive experience of the self. I mean, this system, those memories, this information, this percentage of the universe that a person is, its attached to an actual experience. You can process a visual stimuli or a situation that is objetivly considerer sad, but the feeling of actually see a colour or feel sad about something, that is something that goes way beyond a merely exchange of matter, energy or information. That is the missing component that makes a person. So, once again, if the system is attached to a qualia experience, and the system is ultimatle coded in form a percentage of matter and energy, then, that qualia must be a fundamental property of that matter and energy. Don't get me wrong, it's not a scientific fact, not even a hypothesis, but merely phylosophical speculation.

 

So, if we are a percentage, of a universe that has the fundamental properties for qualia experiences, the whole concept of ego loose its meaning. Persons are just temporary systems and we all are part of the same substance, an universe with fundamental qualia and infinite potential for create consciousness out of new systems. Death itselfs seems like a minor concern, just a process of oblivion and transformation, but always returning to consciusness, since new systems arises all the time. You can read more about qualia in 'The Conscious Mind' a nice book from David Chalmers.

 

That say, life itself offer us many reason to be alive, and to keep the memory of those who are not with us anymore. Remember that as persons, systems, we are still part of a bigger system, the human society, a system wich, yet smaller than the total universe, its very important for our experience of happiness. Happiness, as a mental state, its the most beautifull qualia experience we can imagine, when you feel the qualia of real happiness, of total realization, you need nothing more, you reached the ultimate and absolute end (Aristotle first expressed this idea in The Nicomachean Ethics, and it's part of his "four causes"). A life well lived must strive to happiness, not just for oneself, but for everybody, since we are all part of the same universe, the same substance capable of qualia, capable of the qualia experience of happiness. Maybe one day, the human society turn into an universal consciusness of generalized happiness, turning the whole universe of individual systems in one single state of perfection, a super consciusness like the one in Frank Tipler's 'Omega Point'. That's a cosmological goal, very far from the actual reality of every human being, but not totally unrelated. Keeping the memories of the deceased it's necesary, since its life contributions to the wellbeing of society are part of the very long road to that cosmological goal, a very tiny part of it, almost dismissed, but equaly important. Live a long life, give as much you can to your happiness and the happiness of your fellow humans, and when you die, all that effort will be keept as memory and experience for those who happen to be alive, searching for the same goal at that precise moment. Our bodies are not prisons, but vehicles of a higher goal.

Sorry if I have go too far with your question, it's just that something so meaningfull as the value of a person can't be summarised in a small comment, and by the way, my english sucks, so there must be really bad sentences and gramatical mistakes in my argument, you will have to forgive me that too.

[Framework_zero]

4 hours ago, podsnap said:

None of us is very conscious. We think we are but in fact, unless and until you can control your brainwave functions and your autonomic nervous system, which is where all the important stuff is going on, you are mostly a zombie.

You are confusing consciousness with free will, wich are two different things. Consciousness it's all about experience, nothing more, you can 'observe' your own actions, feel them, process information. Free will is about control, and that's when I agree with you, maybe we are not free at all, since, as you just say, we are not capable of controlling the fundamental functions of our brains. But there is no such thing as control, you can't really define that, I guess a more practical definition of free will is indeterminism. You can say someone is making a free decision when you can't predict the outcome. In theory, if we could manage to scan all brain activity prior to a decision, we could predict the outcome. Yet, there are some models of brain function, such as the Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff that includes quantum phenomenons and non-computable process that are essentially indeterministic.