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Metaphysical status of First Person Experience

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3 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Are your cells in any way "deteriorated" compared to the cell of your ancestor fish of 500 million years ago?

They are.

Think of homeostasis. It's normal for your body to strive for normalcy and mediocrity, that is, the most stable with the least amount of variance. That's what being warm-blooded does, or expelling bodily waste. Even cognitively speaking, you tend to be pushed towards normalcy. This makes sense and requires no designer. If you stray too far from the average, you diverge from what has worked for thousands of years. Sometimes this works, sometimes this doesn't. How does anything advance without variance?

What ends up happening is that very simple organisms survive much longer than any human. Some sharks live up to 400 years. Trees can live 2000 years. Simpler organisms can live even longer. Compared to those sharks, yes, you are more "deteriorated" than a fish.

With stability comes stagnation. The most stable state of being of all is being dead. In a way, life is constant movement away from the average. Becoming more and more an outlier. The trouble biologically speaking is that we become more frail. The greater the complexity, the more things that can go wrong. Not sure what it has to do with the OP, though.

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19 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

They are.

Think of homeostasis. It's normal for your body to strive for normalcy and mediocrity, that is, the most stable with the least amount of variance. That's what being warm-blooded does, or expelling bodily waste. Even cognitively speaking, you tend to be pushed towards normalcy. This makes sense and requires no designer. If you stray too far from the average, you diverge from what has worked for thousands of years. Sometimes this works, sometimes this doesn't. How does anything advance without variance?

What ends up happening is that very simple organisms survive much longer than any human. Some sharks live up to 400 years. Trees can live 2000 years. Simpler organisms can live even longer. Compared to those sharks, yes, you are more "deteriorated" than a fish.

With stability comes stagnation. The most stable state of being of all is being dead. In a way, life is constant movement away from the average. Becoming more and more an outlier. The trouble biologically speaking is that we become more frail. The greater the complexity, the more things that can go wrong. Not sure what it has to do with the OP, though.

Is the fish more deteriorated than the raw materials of the Earth prior to life?

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A new being is produced (in a single line of ancestry) every generation, going back to before humanity, to the mammals, to the reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates... etc.  you the reader is a direct descendant on that family tree of life which is continuous in time and space going back literally hundreds of millions of years in terms of vertebrates alone.  Every one of your ancestors going back to the fish) was physically borne of a mother or borne of an egg borne of a mother... and where fertilization was involved generated of a cell of a father physically put there.

Biological systems produced, new cells, through cell division or cell fusion (e.g. sperm and egg)... to grow and develop individual organisms over and over and over.  Every cell of your body has as its own ancestor, other cells, which had as its ancestors other cells .... to the cells of your parents, of their parents... of their parents.... new cells from other cells in an unbroken chain going back millions of years (at least).

Are your cells in any way "deteriorated" compared to the cell of your ancestor fish of 500 million years ago?  Are YOU somehow a degenerated version of that fish?   No.  You are healthier for life on Earth, more fit, and superior to that fish.  It is noted that you are different from that fish, but that is because the generative and regenerative power of life has been left to be guided by natural selection to produce new organisms rather than put to purposeful manmade use to extend the life of single organisms.  It's use (and modification perhaps HEAVY modification) would be a technological challenge... but not an impossibility.

Nothing that I have argued is refuted by the ability of life to create NEW INDIVIDUAL SYSTEMS.  Entropy based on internal energy state configuration and the necessary life-sustaining irreversible processes that continuously cause it to rise over time are defined ONLY FOR AN INDIVIDUAL ENTITY/SYSTEM.  During the creation process of a NEW INDIVIDUAL, those continuous, irreversible processes have not yet been set in motion inside the new individual.  It is a new, separate system with it's own, different identity which is getting all of its initial energy states built up and constructed during its creation process as all of its atoms/molecules get assembled.

It doesnt detract from anything I've argued.  A living individual with a mind can be conceptually identified as a quasi-stable non-equilibrium open thermodynamic system which needs to undergo continuous irreversible processes to continue to exist.  Those irreversible processes by their very nature eventually doom an individual living entity to death by aging or cancer, like Masel said.  In order to stay alive, the living entity's internal energy states have to continue to get closer and closer to an equilibrium configuration (increasing the number of equivalent microstates that correspond to an individual organism's momentary macrostate) over time, per the irreversible processes that cause that.  At the individual entity level, that continuous approach to an equilibrium energy state configuration eventually manifests itself as aging damage or cancer, per the irreversible processes that cause that.  Self-generating/self-sustaining the life of a given individual entity and creating a new, separate individual entity are two different processes which should not be conflated.  The ability to create new individual entities does not serve as evidence for the possibility of a given individual's indefinite life.  It is an impossibility.

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41 minutes ago, P@NTH3ON said:

Nothing that I have argued is refuted by the ability of life to create NEW INDIVIDUAL SYSTEMS.  Entropy based on internal energy state configuration and the necessary life-sustaining irreversible processes that continuously cause it to rise over time are defined ONLY FOR AN INDIVIDUAL ENTITY/SYSTEM.  During the creation process of a NEW INDIVIDUAL, those continuous, irreversible processes have not yet been set in motion inside the new individual.  It is a new, separate system with it's own, different identity which is getting all of its initial energy states built up and constructed during its creation process as all of its atoms/molecules get assembled.

It doesnt detract from anything I've argued.  A living individual with a mind can be conceptually identified as a quasi-stable non-equilibrium open thermodynamic system which needs to undergo continuous irreversible processes to continue to exist.  Those irreversible processes by their very nature eventually doom an individual living entity to death by aging or cancer, like Masel said.  In order to stay alive, the living entity's internal energy states have to continue to get closer and closer to an equilibrium configuration (increasing the number of equivalent microstates that correspond to an individual organism's momentary macrostate) over time, per the irreversible processes that cause that.  At the individual entity level, that continuous approach to an equilibrium energy state configuration eventually manifests itself as aging damage or cancer, per the irreversible processes that cause that.  Self-generating/self-sustaining the life of a given individual entity and creating a new, separate individual entity are two different processes which should not be conflated.  The ability to create new individual entities does not serve as evidence for the possibility of a given individual's indefinite life.  It is an impossibility.

You missed the part where I talk about external technology.  Oh yeah and also the part where I say the external technology applies the ability to create new life to the problem replacing, bit by bit, degraded parts of an individual, with new nondegraded bits.

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You missed the part where I told you about the arrow-of-time, non-equilibrium nature of living beings.  Replacement of anything cannot happen instantaneously, whether its living or non-living.  At every single instantaneous moment of your existence, your internal energy states are being taken from an ordered non-equilibrium state to a disorded equilibrium state until an equilibrium configuration is reached.  As soon as a moment passes, your fundamental life generating/life sustaining processes are already busy bringing you closer to equilibrium in your next moment of existence.  This is where the nature of all non-equilbrium processes comes in effect and it differentiates you at one moment from you at every other moment of your existence.  This fundamentally disallows a certain amount of any kind of repair/replacement.

Remember I mentioned your example with the muscles and food.  The food doesnt just become waste, the muscles themselves change during every moment of your existence in accordance with the irreversible, non-equilbirum processes they have to undergo.

Edited by P@NTH3ON
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1 hour ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Is the fish more deteriorated than the raw materials of the Earth prior to life?

Sure, at least if by "deterioration" we mean loss of stability within the system. It's also one reason to say that continuity of first-person experience even if there is a physical gap in the instantiation of that first-person experience, as far as the specific mind is concerned, all that matters is the experience remain stable. The mind-system doesn't deteriorate when you sleep, nor does it deteriorate if you go into a transporter that we imagined earlier. It really depends on the level of abstraction to talk about deterioration. First-person experience of a fish is far less complex than human experience, so we could say a rock and a fish are more deteriorated than a human. It's a different story when we talk about the materials a body is composed of.

Edited by Eiuol
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