What's in a name?

VixensVengeance wrote:

Kobos wrote: So my first counter to that is that there is an assumption that the self is only in a physical entity, the telling of the Argo for sure points to this. But, let's examine the information age as our background. You go through my journal right and here all these little tidbits of information that exist. Now these little entries are disassociated from the physical me by way of long term storage as are any forum post I have made. Therefore, now an individual entity of information exists I would assert that by reading them you could gather enough to make an educated guess into my opinions and define the individual that is me. This in some way may infact give the self more importance than in the past. But, as I said I tend to see the self as a smaller part of the whole. Like a red blood cell in an organism. In fact I actually constantly use the society as a body reference frame for a teaching point.

So to answer your questions directly, "So where did they go?" back to the same place they always were, like a drop of rain it is still with in the water cycle but did exist as an individual entity with in a larger entity. It is interesting because it depends on how far you are wiling to break things down. Is every particle's placement in a piece of steel's make up important? I would assert that it depends on the use of the steel.

Much Love, Respect and Peace,
Kobos

Those are very nice points. Allow me to counter! I’m going to do this sort of out of order as that is how my thoughts are flowing. In the case of your journal you claim those entries are disassociated from the self. If I understand you correctly, you go on to say that it becomes an individual “entity” in itself because of the information it contains about you (the self). However I would disagree. Those entries do not constitute an “entity” but simply a map of the entity. There is a discernable difference between that map that represents that entity and the entity itself. Often times these get confused. You can use the map to navigate the entity, (know things about it – your “educated guess”) but the map is not the entity itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

The “more importance” you speak of is actually attributed to the map itself and not the original entity it represents. There is an old tale of a map that was built to actual scale and laid over a land. Over time the map was forgotten to exist and people began to see the map as actual reality. They had a view of the land that was not real because the map was static, just as your journal entry is, and yet the actual land beneath that map continued to change and evolve, just as the actual entity would. In that case what is being viewed statically over time becomes less and less like the actual entity it represents until it reaches a point where there may be no resemblance between the two. Do you possess views today that have changed over time from things you have written in the past? That map/journal entry no longer represents the self because it has no ability to grow.

Let’s take a different approach to this. Say you were given the skill and the raw resources to build a ship. You have a forest of fresh wood and a steel mine in which to forge materials from. You cut the first tree down and decide to name your ship Argo and you set about assembling it. At what point does the ship actually become Argo? Does Argo exist as a ship when it is just raw steel in the ground and trees in a forest? If not at what point in the assembly does it become a ship called Argo?

Say a couple has sex and a child is created. At this point it is a single cell with the potential to become a human being. And let’s say that the couple is capable of telling exactly when that moment of conception happened and they decide to name that child Vixen. Is that single cell really an entity called Vixen or is it just a single Cell? That cell can’t think or feel or experience anything so at what point does it become the conscious entity Vixen? At what point can you define it as a “person”? If that single cell is destroyed for whatever reason before it has a chance to divide was it ever a person? What if it was a bundle of 10 cells or a 1000 cells? We were discussing "where did the individual go" but now i'm asking where did the individual come from?

Sorry it took so long to get back to this post, I wanted to chew on this for a bit. So, to be honest I don't know, and I mean that in the beautiful way. I will revert back to my water table idea. In essence the individual was never separate from the whole but also was. If we want to consider this idea free from the context of time. We will see that to be the case. Both the whole was there as was the fraction we state as the individual. I always like to put it the way it was put by System Of A Down in "Aerials" "Life is a waterfall. We're one in the river. And one again after the fall". You could apply this to material objects too. I.E. The Argo will be constructed from both the design of an individuals mind. So, synapses of energy created through minerals passing through the blood stream ect. create these designs (no need to go into detail on brain function I don't think ) any way then the human who designs dies and these chemicals return to the soil/food chain which in turn gives birth to new life. The Argo is constructed from the materials mined, sails, then sinks, the iron and wood degrade under water (depending on environment again finer points of science) which is then compressed and 1000's of years later the water recedes and they are mined again, the process begins anew. So, the individual only exists when we consider it. So the individual is simply a construct but not one without meaning or effect.

If that makes sense.
Much Love, Respect, and Peace,
Kobos

Kobos wrote: So the individual is simply a construct but not one without meaning or effect.

If that makes sense.
Much Love, Respect, and Peace,
Kobos

Yes, that does make perfect sense to me! This is the place I was hoping your would arrive at. You started with a drop of water, not a construct but a single thing. However a ship or a conscious entity such as a human seems to be so much more than this single thing like a drop of water. It is much more complex and has multiple moving parts and components all bound together by emotion and experience through time. It changes constantly, evolves and yet remains the same.

When you look at a human being and then go searching for its essence, this single "drop of water", as you say, you begin to strip these things away, the experience, the body, the continuity of time, emotion, even the thoughts themselves... all in search of the thinker, what do you find? Not this drop of water (some might call a soul) but what you find is nothing, no thinker of the thoughts, only the parts you took away.

What can be concluded from this? Well for me the only conclusion I can arrive at is there is no thinker (no soul) only the parts. It is the complex array all assembled, the construct, that is actually the self. Not a single thing somewhere in the middle of the machinery operating everything but the machinery construct itself that is "the self". Take a part away and the machinery breaks, the self disappears. Because the machinery itself is what is creating that illusion of self.

Imo it's all semantics, and as long as the language game works, it works
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is about as convincing of an argument as I've seen

What language game is that? I'm glad you found a philosophy that works for you. Exactly how many have you read? And when you found that one did you just quit the exploration?

Any language is the game. Speaking it (making "moves" in the game) follows rules in order to get a desired response: the objective of the game

I've read a lot, I continue to read, and this is just the theory of language that's best convinced me at the moment