Teleology important for science

[IWantGod]

Your memories make you ‘you’. If you had my memories, you’d be me. Quite simple really.

Thats simply not true. There is something that is having memories, that something is you not me. Even if i had your memories i would still be me not you.

You are not simply a concoction of your memories.

 

[Bradski]

Thats simply not true. There is something that is having memories, that something is you not me. Even if i had your memories i would still be me not you.

You are not simply a concoction of your memories.

You’re assuming that there is someone there from the outset. Imagine if you had a person that had grown up with zero (name removed by moderator)ut into the brain. A brain in a vat. Now according to you, there is a ‘someone’ in there. But it’s like a computer with no programme, which is just a box with electrical components.

All the Brain in the Vat (BIV) would be is unthinking wet meat. If you put nothing in, you cannot get anything out. You are the person you are because of all the interactions that you have with the ‘outside world’ and your memories of them. Only you have your memories. If you had someone else’s, then you become them.

Everything that you are is a response to your experiences (together with some hard wired genetic coding). You develop as a person as you gain more experience. There in no-one somewhere waiting for it all to happen.

 

[tonyrey]

tonyrey forums.catholic-questions.org/images/buttons_khaki/viewpost.gif

• Even primitive man intuitively realised there is more to reality than meets the eye and believed in supernatural power…*

That’s a new one on me. Primitive man believed in goblins and trolls and water sprites and thought that thunder was a god being angry and if we sacrifice a goat it’ll help the harvest – and that just goes to show ‘there’s more to reality than meets the eye’. There’s not a lot I can say about the level of logic in that.
Primitive though they were they weren’t as downright primitive as those who believe only in what they can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Primitive man intuitively realised there is more to reality than meets the eye and believed in supernatural power. Christians accept the teaching of Jesus that we should sacrifice ourselves out of love for others, not necessarily by dying but by dying to ourselves.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Christians accept the teaching of Jesus that we should sacrifice ourselves out of love for others, not necessarily by dying but by dying to ourselves.

Like the verifiability principle, yet another frustrating conundrum for the logical positivists.

 

[tonyrey]

You’re assuming that there is someone there from the outset. Imagine if you had a person that had grown up with zero (name removed by moderator)ut into the brain. A brain in a vat. Now according to you, there is a ‘someone’ in there. But it’s like a computer with no programme, which is just a box with electrical components.

All the Brain in the Vat (BIV) would be is unthinking wet meat. If you put nothing in, you cannot get anything out. You are the person you are because of all the interactions that you have with the ‘outside world’ and your memories of them. Only you have your memories. If you had someone else’s, then you become them.

Everything that you are is a response to your experiences (together with some hard wired genetic coding). You develop as a person as you gain more experience. There in no-one somewhere waiting for it all to happen.

A new-born baby is aware only of its sensations, feelings and perceptions. From the moment of birth we are in a world of our own which no one knows except ourselves. It is only later we learn the outside world exists but we never know it as intimately as ourselves. Like charity knowledge begins at home and stays at home until the moment we die. We **infer **the existence of everything else but we have direct, immediate, intangible experience of what is occurring in our mind.

There is only one place where materialism exists and it isn’t in the outside world! People like Helen Keller have demonstrated that our inner realm is far more important than anything that happens to our body. She was helped by her teacher but she didn’t get her courage from external events. Nobility of spirit doesn’t exist in the materialist’s scheme of things because it regards us as nothing more than wet meat…From the sublime to the pathetic absurd…

 

[tonyrey]

Your memories make you ‘you’. If you had my memories, you’d be me. Quite simple really.

You mean simplistic. It was an atheist who disagrees with you. Jean-Paul Sartre believed it was our choices that make us what we are but in your scheme of things we are programmed like everything else and have no real identity of our own, just impotent cogs in the machine of nature unable to think for ourselves…

 

[Peter_Plato]

Your memories make you ‘you’. If you had my memories, you’d be me. Quite simple really.

You are completely missing the point. Memories are happening to every human that walks the earth. Memories do not form the loci of consciousness. It is there continually becoming aware of memorial events. But the loci, the source of identity as I, has been there since the beginning. Memories simply don’t explain why it is I who have collected my memories and you who have collected yours.

I am not anyone else nor have I been since I was born. I have been the centre of my experiences since the beginning of my life. Biochemistry and neurophysiology do not explain why I am in this particular body and not in some other or in all others. They do not explain my personal identity as the centre of that consciousness and, because of that, they can’t even explain consciousness as such because the loci of consciousness must reside in personal identity – the “who I am” that is at the centre of that consciousness on order for there to be consciousness in the first place.

 

[Wesrock]

You’re assuming that there is someone there from the outset. Imagine if you had a person that had grown up with zero (name removed by moderator)ut into the brain. A brain in a vat. Now according to you, there is a ‘someone’ in there. But it’s like a computer with no programme, which is just a box with electrical components.

All the Brain in the Vat (BIV) would be is unthinking wet meat. If you put nothing in, you cannot get anything out. You are the person you are because of all the interactions that you have with the ‘outside world’ and your memories of them. Only you have your memories. If you had someone else’s, then you become them.

Everything that you are is a response to your experiences (together with some hard wired genetic coding). You develop as a person as you gain more experience. There in no-one somewhere waiting for it all to happen.

It’s important to note that a hylemorphic dualist does not consider the human mind to be completly independent of the brain. It’s not a “ghost in the machine” situation. It’s not like the “me” is this immaterial thing and the brain and body are just a vehicle. A human is a distinctive whole. A BIV does not have someone in it; it is someone, and that someone has a mind that works through both material and non-material operations. A brain with no (name removed by moderator)ut is going to be a very dull mind indeed, though. It’s not like there’s some ghostly observer trapped in that brain, thinking separately from it. We rely on our experiences.

Granted, I am going to kick myself in thr butt here, because outlining the problems in materialism is not necessarily the same as defending hylemorphic dualism. Whether HD is a sufficient explanation is not the same issue as whether materialism is one, and I don’t wamt to confuse the issue, as I’m especially more concerned with just outlining what the consequences of materialism are than proving it wrong.

 

[tonyrey]

Like the verifiability principle, yet another frustrating conundrum for the logical positivists.

It baffles me how anyone can believe we are mindless bodies incapable of controlling ourselves but I suppose if there is no self there is nothing to control! It simplifies life apart from one minor problem: if we can’t control our thoughts how can anyone be sure we are mindless bodies incapable of controlling ourselves?..

 

[Bradski]

Biochemistry and neurophysiology do not explain why I am in this particular body and not in some other or in all others. They do not explain my personal identity as the centre of that consciousness and, because of that, they can’t even explain consciousness as such because the loci of consciousness must reside in personal identity – the “who I am” that is at the centre of that consciousness on order for there to be consciousness in the first place.

So back we go to the BIV. You have your brain removed and placed into a vat. There are zero external sensations. And none even from the brain – there are no sensors so you can’t sense your brain in the same way as you do your foot, for example (and, incidentally, no pain – you can cut open someone’s brain when they are conscious and they will feel nothing). So where do you actually exist? Well, Tony asks why your mind needs to ‘be’ anywhere. But it is plainly obvious that ‘you’ are now in the vat. Disembodied yet conscious and thinking. You know you are ‘you’ because you have your memories. You remember your wife. You remember going to work this morning. You remember your first bike.

Now the evil doctor starts to remove matter. Neurons and dendrites and everything else that physically makes up your brain. So what is going to happen?

If ‘you’ are a non-physical mind, then removing the physical components of the brain shouldn’t matter at all. You might find yourself thinking at some point: ‘Hey, I can’t seem to imagine colours any more’ or ‘why can’t I remember who I am’, but according to you, you should still be capable of rational thought. Right up to the point where all physical matter has been completely removed.

Now tell me what is left. Are you still there, Peter?

It’s important to note that a hylemorphic dualist does not consider the human mind to be completly independent of the brain. It’s not a “ghost in the machine” situation. It’s not like the “me” is this immaterial thing and the brain and body are just a vehicle. A human is a distinctive whole. A BIV does not have someone in it; it is someone, and that someone has a mind that works through both material and non-material operations. A brain with no (name removed by moderator)ut is going to be a very dull mind indeed, though. It’s not like there’s some ghostly observer trapped in that brain, thinking separately from it. We rely on our experiences.

I’m not sure that you are having your cake and eating it. It sounds at face value that you have a foot in both camps and your argument would be that ‘you’ are still there when all physical matter has been removed. And what else would that be except the ghost in the machine. But then again, I am not familiar with HD, but there’s an interesting write-up on it here by an Aussie philosopher, Dave Oderburg, which I will try to read tonight: newdualism.org/papers/D.Oderberg/HylemorphicDualism2.htm

 

[Peter_Plato]

So back we go to the BIV. You have your brain removed and placed into a vat. There are zero external sensations. And none even from the brain – there are no sensors so you can’t sense your brain in the same way as you do your foot, for example (and, incidentally, no pain – you can cut open someone’s brain when they are conscious and they will feel nothing). So where do you actually exist? Well, Tony asks why your mind needs to ‘be’ anywhere. But it is plainly obvious that ‘you’ are now in the vat. Disembodied yet conscious and thinking. You know you are ‘you’ because you have your memories. You remember your wife. You remember going to work this morning. You remember your first bike.

Now the evil doctor starts to remove matter. Neurons and dendrites and everything else that physically makes up your brain. So what is going to happen?

If ‘you’ are a non-physical mind, then removing the physical components of the brain shouldn’t matter at all. You might find yourself thinking at some point: ‘Hey, I can’t seem to imagine colours any more’ or ‘why can’t I remember who I am’, but according to you, you should still be capable of rational thought. Right up to the point where all physical matter has been completely removed.

Now tell me what is left. Are you still there, Peter?

You don’t honestly think that a completely speculative mental exercise is going to answer a vexing issue in any satisfactory way, do you?

We have no idea whether BIV is at all possible, meaningful or tells us anything at all of any significance and here you are proposing it as your last word on the subject. :dts:

 

[Bradski]

You don’t honestly think that a completely speculative mental exercise is going to answer a vexing issue in any satisfactory way, do you? We have no idea whether BIV is at all possible, meaningful or tells us anything at all of any significance and here you are proposing it as your last word on the subject. :dts:

I’m pretty bloody certain that it would also be impossible to remove the brain as I described. But it IS a hypothetical. It’s a thought experiment. I’m sure you’re familiar with them. Oh, look. Here’s another one.

If I were to rip that particular neuron sequence out of your brain, or if I were to rip out your entire brain and freeze it at the moment of firing of that neuron sequence, does that material actually quantify the meaning “cat,” in itself. Is the concept “cat” in the material? Is there a cat in your brain?

But c’mon, Wes. You…

…don’t honestly think that a completely speculative mental exercise is going to answer a vexing issue in any satisfactory way, do you? We have no idea whether ripping out your entire brain and freezing it is at all possible, meaningful or tells us anything at all of any significance and here you are proposing it as your last word on the subject. :dts:

 

[inocente]

Correction:

An exquisite non sequitur.

An occupational hazard does not entail that “an entire profession” agrees with this particular programmer.

So if a new member was to follow your example, and made up something to mock all Catholics, and got reported, she can tell the moderator that a Forum Elder told her just add “it’s obviously an occupational hazard” and shrug your shoulders and you’ll be fine?

I’d best not say more as I’m still angry with you. We’ve known each other some time, and you don’t usually behave badly. Perhaps the title Forum Elder is just automatically conferred by the system for passing a post count, I don’t know, but the title means you are one of the people who set the tone of CAF, and I ask you to consider your conduct on this thread.

Please stop shrugging your shoulders and give a response which draws a line here Tony!

BTW Do you subscribe to the hypothesis that truth is an isomorphism of mindless molecules? If not why not?

It’s easy to do a CAF search, and it found candidate posts linked below.

Assuming that’s the conversation you refer to: The posts are all by the same poster, who is still a member, so although he’s not posted for a while I’m surprised you think it’s OK to mock another member behind his back. You distort what he says, perhaps subconsciously (subjectively, he seems to have a much better grasp on the subject matter, you don’t appear to comprehend him, but it’s a six-year old thread and I didn’t read the rest). He calls his job software developer, not programmer, so you also distorted that. Software developer usually refers to someone who talks to users to understand business requirements in addition to designing, cutting and testing apps.

Now I wasn’t part of the original conversation but from what I see I’d say his actual, undistorted assertion is supported by real-world evidence - see my next post to Wesrock.

Please link the correct post if this isn’t the right conversation.
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=5783835#post5783835
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=6188546#post6188546
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=6158208#post6158208

 

[inocente]

Is transitory supposed to be an issue? I never realized it was, and certainly philosophers had accounted for such in their philosophies of the mind before modern neuroscience.

Regardless, the claim of materialism is that everything is explained materially. So, in that instantaneous flash of millions of firing neurons (or perhaps over a series of flashes over time), do those thousands and millions of networking neurons take on any actual meaning in themselves, even for the briefest instant? When I think chiliagon, does a chiliagon suddenly manifest itself in my brain? Is the concept of chiliagon manifested within that material for even the briefest moment such that the concept exists there, within it. The meaning not being derived from it or interpreted from it, such as a sign post directing you towards a city ,but actually present there? Or what if we take the entire brain state over a period of time? Is a chiliagon hiding somewhere in there?

As neither of us is bothered about scoring debating points, I’ll answer you with some actual experimental results. This will take a bit of work on your part, but will show what really happens, unadorned by any speculation or theory

I’m asking you to watch a couple of excerpts from an informal talk given by an experimenter, but he doesn’t use jargon (I’m no specialist and understood him fine).

Please watch the first 15 minutes, it will let you navigate the work if the concepts are new, and shows some important results: that language processing can indeed be analyzed, and that the meaning of each specific noun (at least) is processed in basically the same predictable way in all people studied.

The fMRI equipment apparently has high spatial but very poor temporal resolution, so his team also uses MEG technology. Watch from minute 38 for 5 minutes. This shows how the meaning of a noun isn’t a static memory, or even one single dynamic state, but is the progression of a thought pattern over time across all the areas concerned with the various semantics of that particular word. Perhaps nothing like what your intuition might expect.

He goes on to show some results for how this is modified by adding an adjective. Work in progress but will show you something of how meaning of chiliagon works.

Dr Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon (computer scientist, or “programmer” to some )
youtube.com/watch?v=pRBf8BWAG3k

 

[tonyrey]

… Please link the correct post if this isn’t the right conversation.
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=5783835#post5783835
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=6188546#post6188546
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=6158208#post6158208

It’s an occupational hazard of theoretical physicists to be opposed to religion, e.g. Steven Weinberg with his view that:

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion

• wikipedia

As if Marxists in China and elsewhere never commit atrocities…

It’s an occupational hazard of religious people to believe hell is a place of fire and incessant torture:

The most common description of the levels includes the Chamber of Tongue Ripping, The Chamber of Scissors, The Chamber of Iron Cycads, the Chamber of Mirror, Chamber of Steamer, Forest of Copper Column, Mountain of Knives, the Hill of Ice, Cauldron of Boiling Oil, Chamber of Ox, Chamber of Rock, Chamber of Pounding, Pool of Blood, Town of Suicide, Chamber of Dismemberment, Mountain of Flames, Yard of Stone Mill, and Chamber of Saw.

listverse.com/2013/09/04/10-fascinating-descriptions-of-hell/

I’m delighted you referred to my previous discussion with Touchstone who has never answered my final post on that thread:

Touchstone forums.catholic-questions.org/images/buttons_khaki/viewpost.gif
It doesn’t though, and you’ve got abundant exposition from me as why that’s clearly not the case, here. The “self” doesn’t become any less meaningful, real, or valuable because it is reified through matter and energy.

Even to refer to the self as "it" is to devalue "it"! (I'm not criticising you in particular because it is common parlance).

The self (person) becomes less meaningful, real, or valuable if it is “reified” because he or she:

1. no longer has a raison d’etre or objective purpose in life.
2. is **depersonalised **as the result of being reduced to impersonal processes.
3. is devalued by being seen as an accident in the history of the universe.
4. is relegated to the status of a product of events rather than an independent agent.
5. lacks identity, unity, continuity and responsibility by ceasing to be an enduring entity and becoming what Hume described as “a bundle of perceptions”.

That is actually an accounting for the self, and materialism does this, in a way that your theism does not, and cannot.

The “accounting” amounts to an elimination of personhood.

A materialist provides a model that accounts for the self in natural terms, phenomena that are empirically grounded.

I have pointed out several times that we have direct, irrefutable experience of our thoughts, emotions, and decisions - which are found within ourselves, not in what we infer from what we perceive. Try as you might, you cannot escape from yourself as a conscious person in a private realm of your own, utterly distinct from that of anyone else. Why should your five senses be a more reliable guide to the nature of reality than your own thoughts and feelings? Your senses are useless if you cannot use your power of reason.

Your superstitions, by contrast, are no account at all, any more than “the gods must be bowling” accounts for thunder.

Your substitions account for absolutely nothing because the irrational, purposeless energy to which you ascribe everything not only remains unexplained but does not explain the most important aspects of life - truth, goodness, freedom, justice, beauty and love - which you are forced to reduce to “efficacious concepts”. And those efficacious concepts turn out to be no more than electro-chemical patterns which have mysteriously acquired the power of insight into themselves and other electro-chemical patterns… I use “no more than” advisedly because you not only** derive** our minds from them but you also **equate **all our thoughts and feelings with them.

By way of contrast all that we consider most precious is related to personal reality, the highest form of existence of which we have knowledge - and the only form of existence of which we have direct knowledge. Our most inspiring and valuable experiences are related to persons, not material objects. We’re concerned less with the physical dimensions of people than their spiritual and moral attributes.

Your “self”, in contrast to a materialist view, is an utter, impenetrable mystery, entirely magical.

Is matter not an utter, impenetrable mystery, entirely magical? In which respects is it more intelligible than your own mind? Would you use scientific analysis to choose a wife? How would you measure the value of friendship and love? And what in your opinion are the most important things in life?

Perhaps you would like to answer those questions, inocente?

BTW I prefer a superstition to a substition because it is related to being superhuman rather than subhuman…

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Richard Dawkins’ book *The Blind Watchmaker *is the standard case for materialism.

But the title of the book reveals more than it intends. If nature is blind because there is no teleology behind it and it does not know where it came from, where it is going, or even why it is going, then why do we seek the answers to all these questions and find ourselves hampered by a continual stream of scientific paradoxes that reveal a manic quality in the materialist’s vision?

Reason is said to be altogether atomistic, or a function of the brain’s matter. But this does not explain the persistent and vexing questions that science cannot answer, nor does it explain why, the closer science gets to the mystery of being, the more absurd its answers appear to be from a purely materialistic point of view. Einstein said it best. He was not concerned about this or that operation of matter. He wanted to read the “mind of God.”

Which is the occupation of religion, and in that sense at least Einstein surely was a religious man who would have seen no point to the notion of a blind watchmaker.

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.” Albert Einstein

 

[inocente]

Now this question was actually an interesting one, philosophically speaking.

One aspect that definitely cannot be attributed to physical processes alone is the experience – which no conscious human can doubt or dismiss – of consciousness as the loci of experience, of being the subject of our own experiences.

If physical processes alone are responsible for that, then why do I not experience being the loci of experience wherever those same physical processes occur? In other words, in every human brain where they occur?

It does no good – and begs the question actually – to insist that I am having the experience of being aware in my body because my particular physical processes are occurring in my body. It begs the question because that “answer” merely assumes and doesn’t explain why I am in this particular body, and the result of these particular physical processes, in the first place. It does nothing to explain the reason why I am, but tries to make the whole question just disappear in a cloud of polysyllabic technical jargon – a kind of pseudo-scientific incantation to make the question just go away.

What that logic leaves completely unanswered is why do the physical processes in my body produce the experience of being me when those relevantly same physical processes in another body do not? In other words, why am I me, in this particular body, and not the same me in some other body or in all others?

Alleging that physical processes alone account for self-awareness does not actually answer how they do, nor even begin to address the question.

The question boils down – much like getting an ought from an is – to explaining how it is possible to get a subject (personal identity) out of objects (molecules, chemicals, proteins) or different subjects/persons from relevantly similar objects.

First, you probably know but just to be sure, the homunculus idea is a fallacy, because it leads to an infinite regression (if “you” is explained as a little guy in your head, he can only be explained by a little guy in his head, etc.).

The scientific null hypothesis is instead that you are your body. You are therefore completely unique, because no other person there ever was, or could ever be, is your body, memories, thoughts and history. So to coin a phrase, the soul is the form of your body.

As a philosophical theory of identity, that means your identity can’t be static, you’re not exactly the same as yesterday, had a few new experiences, etc. But you’re substantially the same, whereas you’re not such a good match with five years’ ago. But at all times your physicality makes your identity utterly unique, which in itself makes each person irreplaceable. Since you are precious and honored in my sight (Is. 43). Also on the moral side, since your identity isn’t fixed then fate is an illusion, you are not trapped, never too late to be born again. So it works quite well, but how it squares up against competing philosophies of identity I don’t know.

 

[tonyrey]

First, you probably know but just to be sure, the homunculus idea is a fallacy, because it leads to an infinite regression (if “you” is explained as a little guy in your head, he can only be explained by a little guy in his head, etc.).

The scientific null hypothesis is instead that you are your body. You are therefore completely unique, because no other person there ever was, or could ever be, is your body, memories, thoughts and history. So to coin a phrase, the soul is the form of your body.

Is science the sole form of knowledge given that it doesn’t recognise the soul?

As a philosophical theory of identity, that means your identity can’t be static, you’re not exactly the same as yesterday, had a few new experiences, etc. But you’re substantially the same, whereas you’re not such a good match with five years’ ago. But at all times your physicality makes your identity utterly unique, which in itself makes each person irreplaceable. Since you are precious and honored in my sight (Is. 43). Also on the moral side, since your identity isn’t fixed then fate is an illusion, you are not trapped, never too late to be born again. So it works quite well, but how it squares up against competing philosophies of identity I don’t know.

“substantially” seems to give the game away… What exactly does it mean in this context?

 

[tonyrey]

Richard Dawkins’ book *The Blind Watchmaker *is the standard case for materialism.

But the title of the book reveals more than it intends. If nature is blind because there is no teleology behind it and it does not know where it came from, where it is going, or even why it is going, then why do we seek the answers to all these questions and find ourselves hampered by a continual stream of scientific paradoxes that reveal a manic quality in the materialist’s vision?

Reason is said to be altogether atomistic, or a function of the brain’s matter. But this does not explain the persistent and vexing questions that science cannot answer, nor does it explain why, the closer science gets to the mystery of being, the more absurd its answers appear to be from a purely materialistic point of view. Einstein said it best. He was not concerned about this or that operation of matter. He wanted to read the “mind of God.”

Which is the occupation of religion, and in that sense at least Einstein surely was a religious man who would have seen no point to the notion of a blind watchmaker.

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.” Albert Einstein

The very title “*The Blind Watchmaker” *implies the existence of purposeful planning which utilises forces unaware of what they are doing. It is typical of a scientist to ignore metascientific considerations - as if science can provide its own rational foundation and raison d’être…:dts:

 

[Peter_Plato]

First, you probably know but just to be sure, the homunculus idea is a fallacy, because it leads to an infinite regression (if “you” is explained as a little guy in your head, he can only be explained by a little guy in his head, etc.).

The scientific null hypothesis is instead that you are your body. You are therefore completely unique, because no other person there ever was, or could ever be, is your body, memories, thoughts and history. So to coin a phrase, the soul is the form of your body.

As a philosophical theory of identity, that means your identity can’t be static, you’re not exactly the same as yesterday, had a few new experiences, etc. But you’re substantially the same, whereas you’re not such a good match with five years’ ago. But at all times your physicality makes your identity utterly unique, which in itself makes each person irreplaceable. Since you are precious and honored in my sight (Is. 43). Also on the moral side, since your identity isn’t fixed then fate is an illusion, you are not trapped, never too late to be born again. So it works quite well, but how it squares up against competing philosophies of identity I don’t know.

Whether or not YOU remain identically the same or not, is neither here nor there. You remain YOU, the subject of your experiences. What you, nor anyone else, haven’t explained is why there is a YOU to begin with and why that YOU happens to reside in your particular body when it could just as well have resided in any other body. The particular set of molecules that make up your body do not explain why you are there, since YOU, as the loci of your experiences – whether you change or not being irrelevant – could just as mysteriously have come to exist in some other body at some other time and place.

This is why Bradski’s BIV is completely unhelpful. No one knows whether a BIV is even possible nor why it would or wouldn’t be, nor what it takes to ‘enliven’ the particular loci of experience that is you, just as you don’t and can’t know what it actually means for YOU to die until you personally experience it. It is complete and blind conjecture just as it is empty speculation to attempt to explain why any particular loci of experience that is me or you happens to take residence in any particular body or other. All speculation is unhelpful at that point unless it accounts for the uniqueness of each individual subject as the subjective loci of their experiences and why each subject exists at the time and place they do. No one here has even come close to addressing this problem, let alone even show they fully grasp or understand it.