Self-Awareness Issues: A Resolution?

I’ve previously viewed an opinion that there apparently seemed to be no logical reason, in theory, why one couldn’t have more than one self-awareness spread over two (or more) bodies (a counterpoint to those having more than one self-awareness housed in just one body). I’ve now come up with a reason why one can’t have a self-awareness in dual bodies. At least I hope this explains the conundrum.

You’re self-aware if you respond to stimuli, so instead of “I think therefore I am” what comes before even that is that “I respond therefore I am”. Part of that response of course can be thought even if way after the event.

Self-awareness has nothing to do with emotions or intellect or memories or creativity. Poke a foetus with a pin and it will respond. The foetus is self-aware that it is receiving a stimulus.

But there has to be more to self-awareness that. You can respond to a stimulus; I can respond to the exact same stimulus (say a flash of lightning) yet we don’t share the same self-awareness. So, there’s got to be a physical connection between living things in order to share self-awareness (and I don’t mean holding hands either).

To illustrate: You are (or probably will be) self-aware if I stick a pin into your big toe. If that big toe however is then amputated from the rest of you, and I stick a pin into that amputated big toe, there’s no response from you. You’re not self-aware that your (former) big toe has been stuck with a sharp pin! That’s because there’s no longer any physical connection between your (former) big toe and you.

Or take the case of Siamese twins’ conjoined say at the hip region. Now normally these twins would have been just plain identical twins and thus have one self-awareness each. But, because of the physical connection, via a body structure common to both Siamese twins, should that common part be stuck with a pin, presumably both heads, heads that contain the self-aware infrastructure or apparatus, will react. Once separated, no such common reaction will take place. Though I don’t know this for a certainly, it might also be possible that while the twins are still joined, that stroking a part of one twin’s body not jointly shared might produce a reaction in the opposite twin.  

Conversely, if something living is grafted or transplanted onto or into you, that something now becomes part of your overall self-awareness.  But all that still doesn’t really explain why there is for all practical purposes just one self-awareness per customer and why you can’t also be self-aware in a second body simultaneously.

Say I take a 3-D snapshot of you and identify where every bit and piece, atom and molecule, that goes into making you up; what makes you, you at that precise instant, is. Then, using nanotechnology, I recreate another you from the ground up, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, tissue by tissue, etc. You would then have another self-aware you identical to your own self-awareness. That would remain the case - dual self-aware entities - even if you both go your separate ways - Right? Well probably not for several seasons.

Firstly, that definitive 3-D snapshot probably isn’t possible even in theory once quantum fluctuations and uncertainties are taken into account. 

Secondly, there’s that lack of physical contact between you and your built from the ground up alter ego. I once thought that if another entity had the exact same self-awareness as you, you would be aware of that bond since you both share an exact same self-awareness. But, on further reflection, I have to abandon that since that implies faster-that-light speed communication and that’s not allowed according to Einstein and thousands of physicists who have followed in his footsteps.

That’s nowhere more obvious than when it comes to the concept of the infinite cosmos or a Multiverse. If you postulate that the cosmos is never-ending in time and/or in space, then of necessity anything that can happen will happen, an infinite number of times. There will therefore be an infinite number of you which could occur in sequence (if the cosmos is infinite in time) or concurrently (if the cosmos is infinite in space). The same applies if you postulate a Multiverse – an infinite number (or nearly so) of individual finite universes all co-existing within an infinite cosmic landscape.

Regardless, the upshot is one you in the here-and-now (on Earth) and another you out back of beyond somewhere in the cosmos but also in the here-and-now. You, both of you, are equally self-aware; identically so. However, neither one of you is aware of the other. That’s because what one of you is experiencing can only be transmitted to the other you at a velocity that cannot exceed light speed. When you’re talking an infinite cosmos or a Multiverse, you are talking communication time frames between universes of trillions to zillions of years, assuming any interaction is even possible. You’ll be long dead before your equal number, who is out back of beyond somewhere, has awareness’s that can reach you. Except - that argument doesn’t really work if there’s an infinite number of you existing at all times. Some version of you that existed a zillion years ago should have an awareness-of-self that should impact on that you living zillions of years later. No matter which way you slice-and-dice things, one you within an infinite number of you cannot exist in isolation. But each one of those infinite number of you are not in that required physical contact with any one of the other numbers of you, thus no self-awareness co-sharing. 

CONCLUSION

All else being equal, each person has his or her self’s own custom-made, personalized, unique self-awareness. That’s because everyone’s brain chemistry and experiences are unique and so everyone will respond to the exact same stimulus ever so slightly differently.

But there is no law of nature that says that has to be so. It’s possible that two or more people could have an identical sense of self-awareness, if not on Earth, then especially so if there’s an infinite spatial cosmos or a Multiverse. Yet, even if you have an identical you, a more closely ‘you’ than even an identical twin would be, you wouldn’t share self-awareness with your other self and vice versa. Why?

The answer I suggest is separation. There’s no way to communicate one’s self-awareness to the other’s self-awareness, just like your amputated big toe can’t communicate to you if it is whacked with a hammer. There could easily be more than one self-aware you, identical in every way to you, in the cosmos right now but you do not share that identical self-awareness since there is no physical connection present.



Human Reality Revisited: Part Two

In these life and times of your day-to-day activities, going about your business in this four dimensional space-time you find yourself stuck in, I doubt whether you question that what you experience is anything but the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What you see is what you get, and what you get is really real reality, absolute nuts-and-bolts no question about it reality. If that’s what you think, think again.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

REALITY OUTSIDE OF THE STRIKE ZONE: THE NEBULOUS OTHER

What if someone or something else is pulling your chain? So far I’ve gone on the scenario that there’s a really real reality out there for you to experience and absorb. You are pulling your own chain; dancing to your own tune. Now what if some significant other is calling the shots?

You are a natural entity with wetware rooted in carbon chemistry

- A bit outside the scope of normality or what passes for normality, there are whole textbooks full of case studies of brains that haven’t been hardwired up quite correctly and so you’ve cases of people hearing colors or mistaking their wife for a hat or who have multiple personalities or seriously believe they are Alexander the Great, Jesus, or say President Kennedy.

- Although it doesn’t necessarily follow, there are those who believe that those who see ghosts or aliens or angels or the Loch Ness Monster are fantasy prone; just internally generated visions that’s all in the mind. Can shamans, mystics, gurus, and related really visit an otherworld of alternate realities, or are they too just fantasy prone, with perhaps some help from smoking the good stuff. Of course if they are experiencing such things, well that in turn might be evidence for alternative realities.

- And don’t we as adults construct an entire fantasy world for children – Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, even the Bogyman who’ll, we say, do nasty things to naughty kids. Don’t children on their own construct fantasy worlds they live in along with invisible playmates? I wonder if there’s anything really different in principle between children believing in their invisible friends and adults putting their faith in invisible deities.  

- Adults too immerse themselves in fantasy worlds from putting on virtual reality helmets to boldly go (the 20^th Century version of the Star Trek holodeck), to actually dressing up in Star Trek or Star Wars outfits as various characters from those (and other) fictional worlds, to participating in all sorts of role-playing scenarios. Though one would hope that when doing dress-up for masquerade balls and attending fantasy conventions, the adults would be aware that they are doing make-believe. You’d hope that though some fans (fanatics?) can get really carried away to extremes, like naming their kids after their favorite fantasy character, collecting thousands of items of memorabilia, even say modeling and outfitting their home to resemble the interior sets of say the Starship Enterprise. It’s been done! Though I suspect this must be a modern phenomenon. I don’t recall ever hearing about people in the 17^th, 18^th or 19^th Centuries playing at King Arthur, holding mock battles and jousting contests, though maybe I’m wrong on that. It’s certainly common today for hundreds to play dress-up and reenact Civil War engagements, and there’s many a wannabe cowboy out there in suburbia. 

- Your natural brain-in-a-vat scenario might be where some ‘mad’ scientist has cultured some brain cells in a petri dish and eventually grown a full-sized brain-in-a-vat which is kept stimulated 24/7 with electrical impulses – your reality. Or, perhaps your body has aged and kicked-the-bucket but your brain – still alive and ‘kicking’ – has been removed and kept alive but in ‘storage’, but still requiring stimulation, pending a suitable transplant into another body whose brain has died.

- Your natural brain is being manipulated scenario. Say you’re a patient in a hospital in a coma, or undergoing a neurosurgical operation and your brain is being stimulated in an effort to determine what’s what. Perhaps that stimulation is what you take, while in your coma, or under-the-knife, to be your reality – but all you sense and remember is really being induced. There might even be a time dilation effect. Presumably you could electrically stimulate the brain such that the brain would experience or remember years worth of experiences but the applied stimulus is just taking a few minutes. 

- You’re dreaming. You are really a bug-eyed-monster from the planet Zork; or a pussy cat; or even a human; but you’re asleep and dreaming this alternative lifestyle which in this dream state you are interpreting as your actual reality. Until you wake up, your dream IS your reality.

- One or many? You could philosophically argue that the sum total of life, the universe and everything is illusionary and just the product of Your Mind. Life, the universe and everything (all else but your mind) is just Your Mind playing games, a created illusion or construction to keep Your Mind from being bored. Or, you see someone in the shops and you conclude that as you see them, they see you, and both of you have a perception that there’s a really real reality and both of you are a part of that. That’s the common sense worldview, but the universe doesn’t always play by common sense principles. Of course it’s possible that the both of you are all part of a larger mass hallucination; that you aren’t The Mind, but rather one of the creations of The Mind of someone else. 

There is no way you could distinguish any of the above realities from your perception of what’s really real.

WILD PITCH, ERROR ON THE THROW

You are an artificial entity

Needless to relate, there has been a massive amount of theoretical and practical research dedicated towards the goal of creating an artificial mind, a silicon chip mind or a mind made out of silicon chips, machine intelligence, otherwise more commonly known as artificial intelligence. The reasons are manifold, from just the academic pursuit of seeing if it can be done for the sake of seeing if it can be done, to practical applications like designing robots that can assist in making the lives of the handicapped or elderly or the lonely more bearable or beating the pants off of some egomaniac chess champion, to putting artificial intelligence to the same sorts of creative use that wetware intelligence is put to. Perhaps an artificial intelligence can put two and two together and come up with a Theory of Everything, the Holy Grail of physics. Artificial intelligence can also boldly go where wetware intelligence cannot since silicon chips are a bit more durable under extreme environmental conditions than flesh-and-blood.

Put another way, if Mother Nature can evolve flesh-and-blood intelligence, then that flesh-and-blood intelligence can create and evolve machine intelligence (and ultimately that machine intelligence can further evolve and advance the capabilities of machine intelligence). The basic reason is that there is no difference in principle between a squishy neural network, and a silicon chip network. It all operates on electrical connections, complex connects it is true, but just wiring. Now, the question arises, is your mind a squishy neural network or a silicon chip network? There’s also a third possibility. Your mind isn’t physical at all – squishy or silicon – but mathematical. Your mind is just computer code. 

- Your artificial ‘brain’-in-a-vat scenario might revolve around the idea that you, or rather your mind, is just a processing machine sitting on a bench top or on a shelf, maybe as a prototype, being fed data (that’s your reality) to see if your silicon chips are able to ‘think’ outside the box relative to your mind just being a sophisticated adding machine.

- Your artificial ‘brain’ is manipulated (programmed) scenario might be akin to you being a fully functional robotic android though programmed not to know in order to better integrate into the society that created you. If you cut yourself and bleed and feel pain, that’s just a programmed illusion. When you ‘die’ (your programmed use-by date) you’re recycled/reassembled – a form of reincarnation. Most of your memories are false ones programmed into you, so you believe you had a childhood for example.

- Finally, you are neither flesh-and-blood nor silicon chips. You’re just bits and bytes inside a computer. You’re a piece of software. You’re a simulated being just existing in virtual reality, created by others; manipulated by others without any awareness of this on your part.

Human Reality Revisited: Part One

You are an electromechanical device or machine, even if it’s the product of biological evolution. You certainly operate on electricity (converted from the chemical energy in your foods); you’re certainly mechanical. Those bones, joints, muscles; your movements, are certainly mechanical in nature and biomechanical engineering is certainly an active academic pursuit, especially for athletes and those with skeletal-muscular abnormalities. 

Part of that electromechanical you is your brain – more electrical than mechanical, though engineered never-the-less. Your brain houses a very up close and personal part of you – your mind. Your mind is the key to your reality which will not be the same as anyone else’s reality and in fact your reality maybe totally unreal.

The only thing you know that is really real is your mind. Everything else could be an illusion to a greater or lesser degree. Even your mind could be an artificial construction rather than a natural one and you would be none the wiser, but at least an artificial mind would still be a really real mind to you.

Your mind is the gateway to your perceptions of reality. If you have no mind (like before your conception) you have no perception of reality.

REALITY INSIDE THE STRIKE ZONE (EVEN IF NOT RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE OF THE PLATE)

Your reality is twofold. There’s your here-and-now reality, reality as perceived by your five senses and channeled into your wetware; there’s your there-and-then reality, reality stored as your memory inside your wetware. 

In either case, your reality is all in your mind. Your brain chemistry; your neural network wiring are where you’re here-and-now and there-and-then reality lie.

But is that reality accurate? Would your reality match someone else’s version of the exact same events? No!

BRAIN CHEMISTRY

Your brain chemistry is never the exact same moment to moment. Ditto for every other odd bod and sod on the planet.

What determines your brain chemistry? Your age; genetic makeup and background heritage; foods and beverages; sleep patterns; what drugs and/or medicines you use; pollutants in your immediate environment; disease and/or injury to the brain or nervous system; even outside manipulation, say electrode stimulation by a neuroscientist.

Your brain chemistry isn’t the same as anybody else’s. If everybody’s brain chemistry were the same, if everyone were hardwired up the same (neural networks), then each and every one of us would like and dislike the exact same things equally. Each election would be a 100% landslide for all votes would go to one candidate. Even the opposing candidate would vote for their opponent, which is all nonsense as the two candidates (in fact all candidates) would have identical worldviews/policies. There would be no such thing as ‘different strokes for different folks’ and as such the world would be in one hell of a mess.

FIVE SENSES

When it comes to your five senses, your mind doesn’t receive the original stimulus or stimuli, only a crude copy that’s been translated into another language – one that your mind can interpret and come to terms with.

Your mind didn’t receive that photon of light – just an electrical signal describing the information that photon carried.

Your mind didn’t receive that sound wave – just an electrical signal describing the information that sound wave carried.

Your mind didn’t receive that molecule of food odor or taste – just an electrical signal describing the odor or taste information that molecule carried.

Your mind didn’t receive that cat scratch – just an electrical signal describing the sensation of receiving a cat scratch elsewhere.

Everything ‘real’ in the here-and-now is the sum product of the feed via electrical signals into your mind via your five senses. But the ‘real’ in your mind is a crude copy of the ‘real’ outside your mind as input gets translated in the process and any translation is never as good as the original.

Another facet to that is that your five senses can be tricked into perceiving illusions. You’ve experienced optical illusions. A common one is the perception that the Sun goes around the Earth. We still say that the Sun rises and the Sun sets as if the Sun were moving and not the Earth rotating. You’re also probably familiar with the Moon Illusion, whereby the Full Moon at the horizon appears much larger than when higher up in the sky, but it is not. Your perceived reality and real reality aren’t the same. There’s also taste and smell illusions that can be perpetrated. There are illusions with touch and no doubt audio illusions as well. Mankind’s technology helps confuse the picture too. A hologram looks 3-D and solid but isn’t. The mind, via the senses, can be fooled into accepting six (or more) impossible things even before you’ve sat down to breakfast!

You’d be well aware that witnesses in courtroom cases will have their ability to translate what they experienced via their five senses into reliable data that can be recalled into question when the guilt or innocence of the accused is at stake. You’d probably be aware that there are seemingly millions of psychology studies that prove again and again that eyewitness testimony isn’t worth squat and can be easily manipulated via the power of suggestion.

Using independent instrumentation to verify reality like a thermometer or Geiger counter isn’t any better as their readings are meaningless until you use your five senses to read the readings resulting in the same translation issues and thus you’re back to square one.

Even if you have absolutely perfect sensory apparatus, your reality will be relative, not absolute, to someone else’s reality as Einstein so aptly demonstrated. Without going into a longwinded example, just accept that you may see Event A happen before Event B. Someone else in a different frame of reference sees Event B happen before Event A. Yet another person sees Event A and Event B occur simultaneously. That’s why it’s Einstein’s Theory of General and Special Relativity, and not Einstein’s Theory of General and Special Absolutes. 

MEMORY

Your Reality: Strike One: Your brain chemistry isn’t reliable or consistent.

Your Reality: Strike Two: Your five senses that input to mind isn’t reliable.

Your Reality: Strike Three: Your memory is definitely not reliable. Memory is not infallible as those courtroom dramas often highlight.

So, if 100 people experience an event, and have to recall that event say ten years later, how many versions of really real reality are you going to get? What odds that even one of these recollections will be 100% spot on?  What odds that none reflect that really real reality (RRR) of that event (assuming such a concept as RRR in the first place of course)?

To be continued…