X-Message-Number: 23882 Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 09:42:44 -0700 (PDT) From: Scott Badger <> Subject: Re: homunculi > From: > Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 10:03:47 EDT > Subject: homunculi ---------------- "The core of the "identity" question is the "homunculus" problem. If the experience and the experiencer are different, how are they differentiated, and who or what is the experiencer? My tentative answer is that ultimately the experience and the experiencer are the same. There is no one who "has" a quale; the quale IS (or the set of qualia are) the person in that interval. The overlaps identify you (in part) with your predecessors and successors." ------------------- Interesting. Could we explore this perspective a bit? It sounds like you're thinking of an "experience" as a physical or emotional interaction between an organism (e.g. a human) and the environment. The very specific and unique patterns of behavior employed by an organism to react to the environment defines that organism's "identity". The intersection, then, between organism and environment is the "experience". But is there still some sort of qualitative difference between the experience and the experiencer? When an organism sees the color blue, its brain, and perhaps other parts of its body, react viscerally. Neurons go about their business translating the light frequencies and distributing signals which trigger unconsious and consious actions such as memories, comments, reflections, analyses, and other mentations/cognitions. (Do you perceive cognitions as being visceral?) Are all of these actions simply varied elements of "the experience"? Or are the higher-order cognitions the organism produces 'about' the experience something else? Are higher-order cognitions sufficiently 'different enough' in a qualitative sense to justify the existence of an experiencer separate from the experience? Perhaps I'm simply asking if the differences between higher-order thinking and lower-order thinking are sufficient evidence for the presence of a self-entity which is the experiencer in the common sense that we use the term. That is, do the words "I" and "me" make any real sense? If not, why not Dr Ettinger? Thanks, Scott Badger __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23882