>>44371The differences between you today and you yesterday are minuscule. I don't see a mere interrupt in the stream of consciousness as carrying that transformative weight and beside which it neglects that you don't merely lie there motionless but dream, and I think it's well arguable given whatever philosophy or psychological perspective you adhere to that the dream you is the real you and that's who dies every morning. But the brief interrupt and minuscule changes is like saying that every night you shut off your computer you have a different computer the next day. It is in a different state and even if you restore it it's still the same essential computer. Where it can easily be said it's no longer quite the same is where you have to do such an incredible system restore of not outright drive wipe and reinstallation of everything.
I think that part of it is language is much too precise and definite for reality and that it likewise impairs our cognitive faculties of referencing the authentic. When you take some seeds from a plant you grew and then plant them and watch them grow into a bud and flower and then pluck seeds from it to plant those, at which point are those definite things? As one singular being that plant could be said to be it's own process of
plant from the moment it began growing as those seeds, even if one could also just as easily state the entire plant species and form of life is a meandering river and one individual in its species is merely the false current in stream, ready to form and disappear again. But because our language is so imprecise you do not see things that way.
And so then we move onto that plant as a thing, and it has buds as object with it's own separate word, and flower gets it's own thingness followed by a seed. The problem is we are fooled by our senses into perceiving formers and ascribing thingness upon each form.
This is part of the thing I absolutely hate about Western philosophy and Western thought in general, which is that it takes the worst parts of that approach to its extreme. Everything gets dissected until you can no longer see the butterfly for the legs and wings and, in a much broader sense, I suppose that is why so many people have trouble with predicting things like a pandemic. I have largely been unsurprised by everything that has happened over the last 6 months although I still underestimated stupidity in a couple instances even with my already low estimation of it in Man. It is why so many people cannot connect the flapping of the wings with a coming hurricane and tidal surge and cannot even perceive the butterfly itself for that matter.
I suppose riffing off what you say that the misconception could even be of individual formation and selfhood, and distinguishing one plant from another. You pluck it out from the stream and the stream reforms around its absence. Who are you to question? Each person is granted on some level a flawed collection of all the beliefs and memories of his species. It is inauthentic as representative of the whole truth, but he is still a briefly formed tidal pool of knowledge and belief and action.
So could we even say the individual is truly distinct? I think so, and also not.
It does require a holistic approach that's horrifically lacking in humans in general but Western thought in particular and is why Western sciences are often incredibly flawed which is easily seen in writing any research paper.
What it fails to perceive is that reality is not so much composed of disparate objects but rather a series of dynamic systems. The level of authentic perception requires an understanding and perceiving of those systems with our human limitations left grasping in the dark, unable to fathom that for example our star itself is moving and has it's own orbit, and likewise the formation of planets and death of stars.
Perhaps it's human faculties themselves, requiring discrete representations of things, that marrs our understanding through language.
Regardless that process of the replacement of the ship is part of a stream. The thing you were looking at was its own object, and it becomes less and less of its original self through its movement through the stream in the passing of time.
>>44371The differences between you today and you yesterday are minuscule. I don't see a mere interrupt in the stream of consciousness as carrying that transformative weight and beside which it neglects that you don't merely lie there motionless but dream, and I think it's well arguable given whatever philosophy or psychological perspective you adhere to that the dream you is the real you and that's who dies every morning. But the brief interrupt and minuscule changes is like saying that every night you shut off your computer you have a different computer the next day. It is in a different state and even if you restore it it's still the same essential computer. Where it can easily be said it's no longer quite the same is where you have to do such an incredible system restore of not outright drive wipe and reinstallation of everything.
I think that part of it is language is much too precise and definite for reality and that it likewise impairs our cognitive faculties of referencing the authentic. When you take some seeds from a plant you grew and then plant them and watch them grow into a bud and flower and then pluck seeds from it to plant those, at which point are those definite things? As one singular being that plant could be said to be it's own process of
plant from the moment it began growing as those seeds, even if one could also just as easily state the entire plant species and form of life is a meandering river and one individual in its species is merely the false current in stream, ready to form and disappear again. But because our language is so imprecise you do not see things that way.
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