Quote:
Originally Posted by Iscariot
We're not trillions of different people existing momemts apart from each other. You  too much. |
Hahaha, I do smoke too much, but that's beside the point. Our streaming consciousness is not a stable continuous phenomenon, just an emergent property of our biology. We need to be aware of our environment, so we have senses to inform us of what's going on around. We recieve this sensory informaton via a stream of electrical impulses, but... if we are using electrical impulses(via neuronal discharges) this cannot be a continuous stream, otherwise they would not be impulses, simply a flat current. However, we know that nerves do not discharge a flat current, but rather a series of electrical bursts.
What I am saying is that our conscious experience can be likened to a computer screen being refreshed, the nerves bringing in new information every so-and-so microseconds(I think its microseconds, if you want I'll get that for you), the result appearing to be a continuous stream, when in fact it is a series of several different states occuring simultaneously.
Edit: I forgot to add the most important point. These impulses are sent to the brain, which recieves this information and updates itself. In this computer screen analogy, the brain cells would be the pixels on the screen and the sensory nerves, obviously, the feed cables, and the
mind would be the resulting image. When we watch a video on the screen, the mind becomes the emergent phenomenon of images dancing around on the screen. The brain cells, the pixels, find themselves in one state for a moment, and in another the next moment. Even when nothing is occurring, these pixels are reupdating themselves based on the information they keep on recieving, whether it is changing or not.
I hope this isn't getting overdone, but the point is that the brain doesnt exist in a continuous state, but one that updates itself rapidly. In my philosophy, the only difference between myself now and myself ten years ago would be the number of frames that have passed in the time between. How then do I decide when I as an organism have made a significant change? Do I say 'Today is my birthday, so I must be significantly different from myself the day before'?, or do I say 'Well, last month I was a buddhist and now I'm a muslim, so now I have significantly advanced from that point in time'?
It's impossible to put specific markers on mental progress, as it moves so fluidly... the only objective way to do this is to find a means of breaking down mental progress into quantifiable units. To me, this cannot be any simpler than using the brain's refresh rate: this is the smallest observable change in brain states. I simply reason that since we exist in a different state every moment, and over very long periods of time we observe large changes, and it is impossible to identify any other kind of transitional point higher than this, we simply must be a different person every time we refresh, albeit only minutely different.
I don't think I've explained this well enough, but I'll post it anyway and if you don't understand I'll clarify it. *shrugs* Text is so last century.