And why would my leg be mine? It feels obvious to me, but not to everyone, as shown by famous psychiatric cases (Body Integrity Identity Disorder and somatoparaphrenia). The obviousness of identity dissolves as we dig into it. It’s a mental construction or model. It’s part of our theory of the world—something older and more elementary than sciences or religions. Something we possibly share with higher animals. It’s our base software for navigating and operating in our environment.
We make categories of things. There are animals, plants, water, sky, mountains, other humans, and ourselves. At birth, we probably don’t have a clue what any of it can be. We learn it. We learn to read the world through this prism, to decipher it with this key.
Byrnes made interesting posts on LW about how ego/self-consciousness could be seen as a mental construction, and how it’s possible to shift from this paradigm to a holistic paradigm where identity is nothing but vacuity and all is one. I think the post above follows the same trend. The more we dig, the less we understand what we call identity, something that used to seem so obvious.
Do I care for my clone? Honestly, my insight is that it’s very hard to tell in a theoretical questioning, without experiencing the situation for real !
And why would my leg be mine? It feels obvious to me, but not to everyone, as shown by famous psychiatric cases (Body Integrity Identity Disorder and somatoparaphrenia). The obviousness of identity dissolves as we dig into it. It’s a mental construction or model. It’s part of our theory of the world—something older and more elementary than sciences or religions. Something we possibly share with higher animals. It’s our base software for navigating and operating in our environment.
We make categories of things. There are animals, plants, water, sky, mountains, other humans, and ourselves. At birth, we probably don’t have a clue what any of it can be. We learn it. We learn to read the world through this prism, to decipher it with this key.
Byrnes made interesting posts on LW about how ego/self-consciousness could be seen as a mental construction, and how it’s possible to shift from this paradigm to a holistic paradigm where identity is nothing but vacuity and all is one. I think the post above follows the same trend. The more we dig, the less we understand what we call identity, something that used to seem so obvious.
Do I care for my clone? Honestly, my insight is that it’s very hard to tell in a theoretical questioning, without experiencing the situation for real !