Saturday 19 December 2009

Continuity of the Self

^^ Greetings everyone!

I am very sorry for my long absence as I have been very silly. I have had great difficult discovering any thoughts that I may write in a concrete manner. However, as of late, I have been considering the idea of the self a greater amount and found this very interesting indeed. Some happy thoughts for this are below.

Within the last post concerning this topic, we considered the consciousness. I became confused as I wondered if the self could remain constant over certain period of time. As I considered this, I have pondered more about the consciousness.

If we define the consciousness as as deicision maker part of the self (or at least, the decision maker part is a sub part of the consciousness) then we can see that the self does perhaps change constantly. I believe this because the "world" or "reality" or "perceptions" that the self experiences change constantly. And therefore, the decision maker is constantly coming across new decisions and, ultimately, this alters the consciousness due to these decisions being carried out. And, since the consciousness is a part of the self, the self too must change (although we could consider this to be a very small amount of change).

Because of this however, I wondered again, what is the self? This is changing constantly and so how could an individual be an individual if they are not the same individual after the smallest amount of time has passed.

Perhaps we consider a string that connects all of the experiences with one another and this is the true self, a soul. Perhaps this could encompass the entire eself as time changes from the instance the conciousness is created the instant the consciousness passes away (assuming this takes place - which I cannot ultimately know for certain).

But in this case, the consciousness is merely a machine that carries out actions and thinks based on the self. In many ways the self is a condition the includes all experiences and what not before a point and the consciousness acts based on this.

During one day, as I was walking within my happy University, I pondered this and wondered if the self could be modelled as a continuous mathematical function. Then, the problem of the self at one instant in time may be considered as a limit. (^^ I am very sorry if this is very silly of me).

Following this, I wondered, what could this function be dependent on? Well, if we suppose that there is only one time line, (and alsoassuming my constant consciousness theory), we could have the function as dependent only on time and genes (if it is possible to model genes in some way). This is because genes for an individual's (one that may be conscious)body are most possibly unique and therefore would include implicitly the starting position within the physical world of the individual. Then, the factor of time would determine the self at any on time. So if we were knew the gene pattern of the individual, we need only consider the time.

In many ways, I do very much believe this idea of a function as an analogy to how the self may be considered and I am very sorry if this is very silly of me.

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