True things
Lee Smolin: The Trouble with Physics, p44: a description of non-background-dependent descriptions. “We no longer have fields moving in a fixed-background geometry. We have a bunch of fields all interacting with one another, all dynamical, all influencing one another…”
Personality generated the same way, as a product of all the interacting systems of a body. Even the context, which seems like a fixed frame, is a process & part of the process. Personality a constantly shifting product of these processes & interactions. Every process is responding to every other one via “rules of engagement” that only apply to that type of transaction. No station-master is needed-or could be developed-to oversee the process. When was the last time you gave an instruction to your liver ? A liver cell knows nothing but how to be a liver cell; its “knowledge” of being a liver cell consists in operating. It never gets instructions from above, from a unifying regulator. It reacts to inputs in ways determined by its own rules. “You” is the second-by-second product of a billion decisions taken second-by-second by thousands of totally autonomous systems. “You” stacks up; it accretes, or agglomerates-but it also falls down and changes and shifts evanescently moment by moment. “You” is a by-product, an artefact of all those processes. You don’t like to be told that. It’s offensive. But once you understand it you understand the evanescence and undependability of a conscious personality.
Then, in response to a comment: "...Does the personality develop cohesion & power ? Or is that only a view it must have of itself, to avoid being offended-in the sense of traumatised-by the understanding of its own nebulosity ? Is consciousness precisely that ? Those are the questions I love. I like the vision of personality as nebulous, shifting, occurring without agency moment-to-moment in an interactive space which can never be defined as a whole except at the next level. But I’m not trying to foist this essentially Gothic/Gödelian view on anyone."
It's nice to know that someone out there thinks along the same lines you do, isn't it?
Personality generated the same way, as a product of all the interacting systems of a body. Even the context, which seems like a fixed frame, is a process & part of the process. Personality a constantly shifting product of these processes & interactions. Every process is responding to every other one via “rules of engagement” that only apply to that type of transaction. No station-master is needed-or could be developed-to oversee the process. When was the last time you gave an instruction to your liver ? A liver cell knows nothing but how to be a liver cell; its “knowledge” of being a liver cell consists in operating. It never gets instructions from above, from a unifying regulator. It reacts to inputs in ways determined by its own rules. “You” is the second-by-second product of a billion decisions taken second-by-second by thousands of totally autonomous systems. “You” stacks up; it accretes, or agglomerates-but it also falls down and changes and shifts evanescently moment by moment. “You” is a by-product, an artefact of all those processes. You don’t like to be told that. It’s offensive. But once you understand it you understand the evanescence and undependability of a conscious personality.
Then, in response to a comment: "...Does the personality develop cohesion & power ? Or is that only a view it must have of itself, to avoid being offended-in the sense of traumatised-by the understanding of its own nebulosity ? Is consciousness precisely that ? Those are the questions I love. I like the vision of personality as nebulous, shifting, occurring without agency moment-to-moment in an interactive space which can never be defined as a whole except at the next level. But I’m not trying to foist this essentially Gothic/Gödelian view on anyone."
It's nice to know that someone out there thinks along the same lines you do, isn't it?