ReasonFirst

@Eiuol No, I would say the same thing about identical twins and two separate human beings even if they were perfect copies of each other. One reduces down to fundamental constituents that are separate from all other existents and the other reduces down to other fundamental constituents that are separate from all other existents, in accordance with what I have stated before. They each perform their own actions that are metaphysically inseparable from them, i.e. they each have their own inseparable mind. There is a meaningful way to say that it is "you." A low-level continuation of the essential processes your body must go through is still in existence, and that's why you still do exist, as long as those are occurring. So even if you are "psychologically dead" as you mention, the required foundation (your biology) is still operative, so you're still alive. You may not be self-aware, I'll grant you that. Your higher level functions (beliefs, thoughts, awareness) might not be happening but your low-level functions (which are complementary to your higher-level functions and are also a part of what makes you an individual) are still working, so you still exist.

@Eiuol I apologize for using distracting text. You wrote, "All you argued here is that a mind can't be disembodied. I don't disagree. This doesn't say how a conscious mind can or cannot be transferred to another entity." I would say that it does because by virtue of the mind being (at a basic level) a process that is done by a particular entity, that makes it inseparable from that particular entity and makes it a particular mind. It is not a process done by another entity, it is a process done by "this and not that" entity in accordance with the law of identity (whatever the thing is, dog, cat, elephant, human, whatever). And this is where the word "transferred" is inappropriate. That word "transfer" implies movement from one place to another, which is a concept applicable only to entities, which the mind is not, as you and I agree on. You also wrote, "If you want to define "you" as also the physical body you have, that doesn't make sense to me. As long as there is a body it doesn't matter. The question is if you have a psychological death, not just a biological death. It isn't enough to say "the light went out". Another way to phrase the question: if you die biologically, does this mean you always die psychologically?" Well I would say yes you do die psychologically if you die biologically. Because your psychology is ultimately based on your biology. If the required foundation stops existing, then anything that follows from it can't exist either. It would be like saying that a treehouse can exist without a tree. And I meant to define "you" as a physical body that continuously undergoes essential physical processes. That latter portion of the definition "that continuously undergoes essential physical processes" is an essential part of the definition. Furthermore, I would be careful about making claims that a FPE before a coma is distinct from after a coma and that a consciousness "completely halts" and comes back. Doctors say that "someone who is in a coma is unconscious and will not respond to voices, other sounds, or any sort of activity going on nearby. The person is still alive, but the brain is functioning at its lowest stage of alertness." That part, the "lowest stage of alertness" part is an indication that even in a coma your consciousness is still operative at a basic level. And a much stronger argument can be made for going to sleep and waking up, your consciousness is still there, it is only its strength that has changed. Even bacteria that is supposedly "frozen" and then "brought back to life" has never died. There are organisms on this world that have metabolisms that can continue to function in what is called "cryobiostasis." Their identities allow their organs to function at such a minimal level that we call "frozen" but they are not truly frozen or static like what you might think.

@Eiuol you wrote, "That's the problem right there. I'm not treating consciousness as a constituent, fundamental or otherwise. I am treating it as irreducible, but I'm not also treating it as a fundamental "thing". That is, it isn't made out of parts to take apart and reassemble. Rather, consciousness and the mind is all or nothing. As I said earlier, the mind is a process. That's why it can go out of existence then return to existence. I described earlier that some things can go out of existence then return. I'd agree with you if consciousness or the mind were a type of particle, or fundamental constituent of reality. My whole point is that if a mind is continuous in all the ways I mentioned, that is the same "you". The mind is not an entity anyway, at least not by Objectivist standards. An entity would be some sort of physically bounded object, usually on the perceptual level." Ok, first I want to make sure that we are both thinking of the same definition of the word "fundamental." I would say that the word "fundamental" is synonymous with "irreducible." There are existents that can be broken down into simpler existents. Those existents are not fundamental. Those existents are not irreducible. If they are broken down, the simpler pieces that you can observe after the breakdown may or may not be "fundamental" or "irreducible." However, if you keep on progressively breaking something down into simpler and simpler constituents, EVENTUALLY you will get to a purely "fundamental" or "irreducible" constituent that cannot be broken down further. These fundamental constituents, whatever they may be, whether they are atoms, particles, waves, whatever, are irreducible primaries that cannot be destroyed and recreated and will always be separate from one another. I agree with you that the mind is not a "thing" and at this point I also want to make sure that we can distinguish between "consciousness" and the "mind." I am treating consciousness as a state of awareness that we can achieve only by having a mind. Consciousness is not an entity, it is a state of awareness. And the mind is a faculty for perceiving that which exists and I agree with you that is a process. But "awareness" and "process" are meaningless terms if we don't specify WHAT is BEING AWARE and WHAT is UNDERGOING THE PROCESS. Ultimately, both "awareness" and "process" are metaphysically based on what is being aware and what is undergoing a process. So what is being aware and what is undergoing a process? Well, the answer to this question first comes from you. It involves your self-identification. When you started existing, you went through the process of first identifying existents which are not you. You identified entities and then at some point you grasped that they each possess an identity. If you have ever seen two entities which are perfect copies of each other you can hold one in one hand and hold the other in another hand and you can grasp that entities, even if they are perfect copies of each other, are not one entity. You can destroy one and the other still exists. You can damage one and the other entity exists unharmed. So you used your mind to gain an awareness of the external world first and then as you got older your awareness ascended into a higher-level self awareness, which you achieved by using your mind to identify WHAT YOU ARE. And by using my perception and proprioception, what I have identified myself to be is entity, a "physically bounded object, usually on the perceptual level" as you put it. But of course, not just any "physically bounded object, usually on the perceptual level." A "physically bounded object, usually on the perceptual level" that CONTINUOUSLY undergoes self-generated, self-sustained ACTION. That ACTION is the foundation of your mind and subsequent state of awareness (consciousness) and the foundation of that ACTION is the ENTITY that is doing the ACTION, not SOME OTHER entity away from the entity that is doing the action. YOUR "mind" and consequently YOUR states of awareness (consciousness) are metaphysically grounded in the entities (your functioning organs) which you are made up of (which I have stated above are separate from all the other entities that exist in the universe when broken down enough). And if you are like me, whatever continuity of your mind exists ONLY EXISTS across the entities (your functioning organs) that are constituting you as one whole integrated macroscopic entity. That continuity DOES NOT and CANNOT extend beyond the entity that it is metaphysically grounded in, which is ultimately SEPARATE from all other fundamental constituents in the universe.

@Eiuol you wrote "I think you're asking in the second question what would happen if I use a transporter that assembled another version of me at the other end of the transporter, while my current self stayed put. In a sense, that would only be one of me still. But this is where it would get weird. I would describe this as a "branched" version of me. It would be like having a parallel mind. I don't think in principle a mind must only have 1 first-person experience. Why not 5 distinct first-person experiences? Part for part, they are distinct, but they are still all me. " And you also wrote "I know my solution is very weird, but I don't think that violates the law of identity." This is where the law of identity is either misunderstood OR it is not being as clear as it should be. For EVERY existent that exists, there is a "this one and not that one" aspect of its existence that sets it apart from all other existents. This would be better understood if we consider lets say 5 fundamental constituents of reality and lets assume that they are all EXACT PERFECT copies of each other. They can be particles or atoms or "waves" or whatever fundamental "something" that cannot be destroyed or "reconstituted." Regardless of what these fundamental constituents may be, they would have an identity in accordance with the law of identity that we have validated through observation in everyday life. These 5 fundamental constituents are FOREVER (in ALL of the past and ALL of the future SEPARATE from one another no matter what may be done to them, keeping in mind that they cannot be destroyed and "reconstituted" because they are fundamental constituents). If a fundamental constituent was capable of having First Person Experiences, its first person experiences would be the first person experience of that particular fundamental constituent. In other words its cognition might go something like this, "I am a fundamental constituent that looks a certain way, thinks a certain way, and I see 4 OTHER fundamental constituents that are NOT ME but they look exactly like me and it looks like they think exactly like me. It looks like we are copies of each other." And macroscopic entities are just the integration of these fundamental constituents. If fundamental constituents 1 and 2 integrated to create a higher level entity, that higher level entity would be metaphysically inseparable from fundamental constituents 1 and 2 but it would be SEPARATE from whatever fundamental constituents 3, 4, and 5 could integrate to become. If the higher level entity made up of fundamental constituents 1 and 2 would have a first-person experience, that first person experience would be created by fundamental constituents 1 and 2 having a first person experience as the ONE higher-level entity that they have integrated THEMSELVES TO BE. The "branched" version of you that you mentioned is made up of separate entities that are NOT THE ENTITIES that constitute the real one and only you. They are as SEPARATE from you as fundamental constituents 3, 4, and 5 are from 1 and 2. They are not you.

@Grames I'm sorry I have one more question related to misperception. Let's say for example that I misperceive a temperature, do I have a right to claim that a temperature exists in some quantity even though I haven't perceived it? Or if I misidentify a watercup as a ball, do I have a right to claim that something exists? This kind of relates to my thinking about "depth perception" and it being distorted. If your perception is distorted, you have misperceived something (some object) but I think you must have at least done something right if you were able to achieve the form of perception that you did. And I'm wondering are there any valid claims that you can make based on misperception like the examples I gave?

@Grames you mentioned “Your issue is very much similar to debating if a thing is truly red or merely painted red. The appearance of redness is genuine in either case, and so is the appearance of three dimensionality in your example where the 3-Dness is 'painted on'. That appearances can be deceiving is long known.” So here is what I find troubling about your statement. In your example, there is actually something about the paint that contains physical properties that I perceived as red. It EXISTS and is there for me to perceive it. And it was placed on the object which also EXISTS and is there for me to perceive it. I understand this situation. But I don’t think my example should be granted an equal status and I will try to argue why. In the case when you are focusing on a 2D screen, THERE IS NO THIRD dimension so therefore it follows THAT THERE SHOULD BE NO WAY TO PERCEIVE it. You can’t perceive something that doesn’t exist. You only may perceive something else and you might think that that something else is something, in which case you would be perceiving something but mistaking it for something else. Although this whole situation with 3D glasses is making me doubt what I wrote in my previous sentence so I am actually interested in what you think about being able to perceive something which does not exist. For example, if we did not live in 3D universe, only 2 dimensions, would it even be possible to perceive or even misperceive a third dimension if a third dimension didn’t even exist? I would assume that it would be impossible and I based some further thinking about this situation on this assumption and it gave me another idea. Even with 3D glasses, whatever object you are perceiving, even if it is a 2D screen, is still located a certain depth away from you. And it might be possible that you can misperceive that depth and misperceive it varyingly (by “varyingly” I mean certain parts of it appear closer than others) under the right circumstances. So I read a little bit about what those circumstances might be and I stumbled onto stereopsis. So it turns that there are multiple mechanisms by which we perceive depth, with a major one being by having two eyes spaced a certain distance apart. In normal vision, because the eyes are spaced a certain distance apart, your eyes get two slightly different images delivered to them by light and light is incident at slightly different angles. Your mind than takes those images and integrates them into sensations. Then it integrates those sensations into a perception. And it actually uses the two different images to perform the integration to perceive depth. And it is at this point that I have another doubt and it relates to what to DavidOdden stated about the “metaphysically given.” I find myself asking “Is depth metaphysically given?” If depth is perceptual, then it has to be “metaphysically given.” But it just might be so that only objects are metaphysically given. This is also why I titled my post the way I did. I am starting to suspect that “depth perception” might instead be a first-level concept and I would be very interested in your response to this thought. Besides the question about depth, another reason that I am thinking that “depth perception” could be a first-level concept is that we all make an implicit assumption (and no assumptions are supposed to be involved at the perceptual level of consciousness) that we do not think about when we look at any object. That implicit assumption is also how the makers of 3D glasses trick us into perceiving a 3rd dimension that IS NOT THERE. We assume that we are looking at the SAME OBJECT WITH BOTH EYES. This turns out to be an extremely significant and overlooked implicit assumption because passive 3D glasses actually filter two types of light that are coming from DIFFERENT LOCATIONS from a screen. One lens blocks out one type of light so your eye never sees it and the other lens blocks out the other type of light so your other eye never sees the light the former eye sees. THIS IS HOW YOU GET TWO DIFFERENT IMAGES DELIVERED to your eyeballs. You’re actually looking at two different pictures (objects) and you don’t know it. Active 3D glasses create an almost equivalent situation but not exactly the same. They either function as a screen or synchronize with a T.V screen to alternate back and forth between images that your right and left eyes would see if you were not being deceived. The TV shows an image intended for your right eye and your left lens darkens completely (so your left eye never sees the image intended for your right eye) and a split-second later the TV shows an image for your left eye and your right lens darkens completely (so your right eye never sees the image intended for your left eye) and this happens so fast and frequently that your brain can’t tell the difference. It’s a slightly different situation but it achieves the same end result, you get two slightly different images delivered to your eyeballs that your eyes would not see if they were both simultaneously looking at one image on a screen, but THAT THEY WOULD SEE if you were looking at the object in real life. It’s almost like your mind is performing a trigonometric triangulation calculation with an object being one vertex and your two eyes being the other two vertices… The bottom line is that those glasses deliver two slightly different images to your eyeballs and your brain integrates them into one whole 3D perception. The last question I am hoping to get your response on which is slightly tangent from this OP (but not too tangent) is the following: Is there a spatial relationship that exists between entities in reality independent of the mind? And if it does exist independent of the mind, is it “metaphysically given” (meaning can it be perceived?) or is it just metaphysically real and conceptually identified? I know Peikoff said that “Space is a concept” but he did mention that it refers to relationship between entities so I am thinking that the relationship it refers to has to exist in reality, right? The reason I ask this is because I think depth perception might be based on the conceptual identification of a spatial relationship between “metaphysically given” entities. I don’t know about depth, but I suspect that you can at least know based on observation that we live in at least a 2D universe because you can visually perceive at least in 2D (because the images you get even of the real world are in fact in 2D) and you can geometrically conceptualize that you can two perpendicular line segments between the entities you see that would also determine two axes (or two dimensions of space). I think connecting these line segments and understanding how they determine two axes of space could be the very act of conceptually identifying the spatial relationship between entities. And I think that the way that you know that there is a 3rd Dimension is by connecting line segments from the entities that you see in 2D TO YOURSELF (since you yourself are self-aware and are therefore also at least a “metaphysically given” entity). When you connect this line segment to yourself, I think you have conceptually correctly identified a 3rd dimension of the spatial relationship between you and every other entity that exists. I think by going through this geometric proof you can at least know that there are 3 dimensions and depth has to exist as a result of this conclusion being true and it may exist in any quantity, but it must exist in some quantity.

Recently, I read a transcript taken from one of Binswanger's lectures in which he defends perception from certain skeptical attacks against it. He calls perception "inerrant" which means that the information that you do perceive cannot be wrong because it is silent and cannot play tricks on you because it does not tell you anything. The concepts that you form based on perception can be wrong, according to my understanding of Binswanger. At first, I was in complete agreement with this but then I thought of the example of depth perception. With modern 3D glasses (either passive or active), it seems to me that your eyes are truly deceived because they get sensory input that leads to you perceiving a 3D object that is not really a 3D object at all, just a projection on 2D screen. I see this as significant because if depth perception can be wrong, then so can all perception, which conflicts with Oist epistemology's teachings that humans are infallible at the perceptual level. The only way that I could think of this not invalidating the sense of sight is if depth is not something that is perceived, but instead is a concept formed based on perceiving entities that have a spatial relationship to you. I know that Peikoff did mention that Space is a relational concept and refers to a relationship between entities that exists in reality. And this reinforces my thinking that depth cannot be perceived because depth is like space and there is no such thing as the space between two entities to perceive in the first place. There is only a relationship between entities that exist in the universe. I'm not sure about this though and I hope to learn what anybody else's thoughts are on this.

So I read Bissell's paper and some of his statements have certain problems. Ayn Rand did once say that a consciousness that is only conscious of itself implies a contradiction and therefore an impossibility. She mentioned this to argue that the process of consciousness starts with an entity receiving sensory data from the outside world and ends with external and subsequently internal awareness. But some of the statements that Bissell makes conflict with Ayn Rand's statements. For example, Bissell states "Consciousness is a necessary aspect of brain processes at a sufficiently high level of complexity and/or intensity. It can no more exist apart from those processes than can the color, mass, or volume of the human body, or the incandescence of an iron rod of certain high temperature; [27] nor can those brain processes exist apart from consciousness." "Consciousness is a natural, necessary attribute of those brain processes at or above that particular level. Those brain processes would not be those brain processes, were they not also possessed of their attribute of consciousness. Had consciousness never existed, it would be because brain processes of a sufficiently high level of complexity and intensity had never existed--otherwise, consciousness would have to have existed." If you consider the "brain processes" that Bissell discusses and imagine the exact opposite processes, you'll find that there's a problem. Basically, REVERSE the processes that Bissell discusses similar to hitting the rewind button on a VCR so that EVERYTHING happens in reverse, you would end up with a different, opposite brain process which starts with awareness and ends with the entity sending sensory data into the external world. This reverse, opposite brain process would have the same "complexity/intensity" as you had in the forward direction and would also be a conscious process according to Bissell. So, you would end up with an entity who never received any information from the outside world and according to Bissell he would be conscious (either of the outside or himself but the point is according to Bissell, he would be conscious, which can't be the case if he never received any information from the outside world).