There are a lot of bad countries to be born into, I mean just look up the countries with the top number of births.
Also, reincarnation might not be limited to humans… lots of factory farm animals out there for you to be reincarnated as… 👀
Honestly its one of the reasons I wanna live this life as long as I can, I wanna delay being in Afganistan, or North Korea, or a mouse that gets killed by the housecat, or being a damn cockroach.
Repressed memories from trauma still leave subconscious changes in behaviour, though.
If I lost all my memories until the age of 12 and no trace of any habit or thought remained, then yes. Whoever I used to be died.
I am my brain and the memories it contains. I am the SD card.
You aren’t your brain, your brain and body are completely apart from you and don’t care what you’d like. If you were your brain you could stop beating your heart at will, stop digesting, stop or start functions that you are in control of. You’re not in control of anything; not even what you are seeing. Just your perspective and what you make of those experiences. Also, the change in behavior is also mostly up to your body and brain; not you. If you’re hungry, your judgement is clouded and skews towards the negative, not because that is your want.
If I was completely in control of my identity, I could stop being bisexual at will. Not a very compelling argument.
Sorry, where did I say you were?
Actually, you and I are saying the same thing. There isn’t a lot you control about yourself. Did you even read the argument in question?
Your argument - if I understood it correctly - was that I’m not my brain because I’m not in complete control of my brain. But then I’m not in complete control over what most people would agree is part of my identity.
Well, you aren’t. You didn’t chose most things about yourself, you just think you did as to not cause existential crisis. Your favorite foods, your sexuality, what you think is funny, what smells like perfume and what smells like poop; all has very little to do with anything you consciously chose. Most of the things I mentioned are decided before you’re born.
That is true. But it also doesn’t prove that I’m not defined by my brain and memories. I didn’t chose to have most of my memories either.
I agree with you, but the memories you keep at the forefront aren’t your choice either. You tend to remember the negative moments more vividly because your brain is trying to protect you from experiencing it again. A useful tactic in times past, but not so much anymore. I’m not saying you’re not you- you are. There is a you apart from your body and mind, but it is much much less than people would like to realize. It’s more like you’re a ghost in the machine. You think you’re the driver but you’re really just the passenger that gets to say where to stop every so often, but not consistently.
Ah, that is a take I can understand. I can’t say I completely agree, but thanks for clarifying!
Ultimately the difference between our arguments is just vibe-based, I think. I don’t feel like there’s a “ghost in the machine” outside of my brain, but, again, it’s just a personal subjective feeling.
I don’t like the idea that “memory = identity”
Memory is part of you, but doen’t solely define you.
If someone made an identical clone of you, like every atom and molecule, even the neurons. Is that “you”? Did you split into 2?
If we then destroy the original, are “you” still “alive”. I mean someone has the exact same memories, same atoms.
That’s just Ship of Theseus and can’t be defined.
I’m not made of the same atoms and molecules as I was a decade ago. Some of them might be still around, but it’s mostly completely new particles. Am I still the same person I was a decade ago? If not, how come I can claim ownership of stuff some other guy with the same name bought back then?
I think I’ve read that on the quantum level you actually can’t make the exact same configuration of particles and energy levels in two places at the same time. Trying to create a copy of an object (or, in general, any configuration of particles) would inevitably cause the original to cease to exist. But it’s also mostly a thought experiment, as we can’t do that with more than a few quantum particles at a time.
So far, as best as humanity is able to tell, your memories are you. If we ever get to Star Trek style teleportation, maybe we can define that more rigourously.
Quick edit: I am quite enjoying this debate, though - interesting to hear other people’s takes on identity, soul and all that stuff.
I tend to agree with people like Wittgenstein, Bohm, Engels, and Benoist, that identities are ultimately socially constructed. Aristotle believed identifies are physically real, so that a tree or a ship physically has an identity of “tree” or a “ship.” But then naturally you run into the Ship of Theseus paradox, but many other kinds of paradoxes of the same sort like Water-H2O paradox or the teletransportation paradox, where it becomes ambiguous as to when this physical identity would actually come into existence and when it goes away.
The authors that I cited basically argue that identities are all socially constructed. “Things” don’t actually have physical existence. They are human creations.
One analogy I like to make is that they’re kind of like a trend line on a graph. Technically, the trend line doesn’t add any new information, it just provides a simplified visual representation of the overall data trend of the data, but all that information is already held within the original dataset.
Human brains have limited processing capacity. We cannot hold all of nature in our head at once, so we simplify it down to simplified representations of overall patterns that are relevant and important to us. We might call that rough collection of stuff over there a “tree” or a “ship.” The label “tree” or “ship” represents an overly simplified concept of some relevant properties of interest about that stuff over there, but if you go analyze that stuff very closely, you may find that the label actually is rather ambiguous and doesn’t capture the fully complexities of that stuff.
Indeed, if we could somehow hold all of nature in our heads simultaneously, we would not need to divide the world into “things” at all. We would just fully comprehend how it all interacts as a single woven unified whole, and the introduction of any “thing,” any identity, would just be redundant information.