辽宁：“两癌”筛查将实现全省农村全覆盖

Question

From Wikipedia:

Benj Hellie's vertiginous question asks why, of all the subjects of experience out there, this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—is the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)

Basically, this question, if I am to understand it correctly, is asking that given the fact that there are many conscious individuals that exist, and given that I am one of these conscious individuals, how, and more importantly why, am I this particular conscious individual who has his lifespan in this era of the world and human history and who was born in that particular point in spacetime (when referring to the date and place of my conception)?

Some people like to be smart-alecks about this and state that it is a tautology, rephrasing the question into ‘Why is Alice Alice?’ and then answering the question as so: ‘Because if Alice wasn’t Alice she’d be someone else.’ Obviously the question is much more sophisticated than that, and is one of the greatest philosophical questions one can possibly ask, touching the intersection of philosophy of consciousness, metaphysics, and the soul among other things.

So I was wondering if there have been any serious discussions about this question, which give it the importance it deserves.

Answer 1

This question is arising, or more importantly, vexing you, because you have wrong ideas and you have fixated on them. The notion of a persisting separate self was debunked long ago, not only by the Buddha, and has been called in to question as long as humans have existed.

Children usually don't have this question, because they are busy doing what they do and not pondering. Older people usually brush it aside also because it leads nowhere. It is like pausing in a doorway and asking why you are in this particular doorway? Walk on!

Meditation is a good way to begin dissolving delusions about self. It has been proven for thousands of years. Eventually, many people see Nonduality which allows for knowing these sorts of things. It works.

Anecdote: I was driving on a freeway one time about 30 years ago, heading towards an underpass where I would go under a bridge of a large road. I saw all the cars on the bridge, but also a man jogging across... Time slowed, his strides slowed to a drumbeat, and I thought, "He has a life, too." The realization struck me with such force that tears came to my eyes and I nearly lost control of the car. All I could think for the next couple minutes was, he has a life, too.

These days, I often become aware of this when I see someone walking across the street ahead, or in a restaurant, on a plane, from an office window... Their life is as present and complete for them as mine is to me. When I walk in a cemetery on breaks from work, I see all these names of people with entire lives before my grandparents were even born.

Think of 100 billion humans who have lived, and half died from mosquito borne illnesses. Think what you can do with your dash. "Don't waste your time greeting people!"

Answer 2

We may use SEP's entry reagarding Consciousness for general context.

More specifically, Hellie raises the "vertiginous question" in his review of of David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness (2010), where he rejects what he calls the "egalitarian stance":

"I trace this odd commitment to an egalitarian stance concerning the ontological status of personal perspectives—roughly, fundamental reality treats mine and yours as on a par. While egalitarianism is superficially quite plausible, the systematic theory of consciousness unfolding from it is besieged by objections from top to bottom. So if we judge egalitarianism by its fruits, it turns out to be extraordinarily implausible." [Note: I cannot find a source for "egalitarianism" wrt consciousness.]

We may consider at least Hellie's proposed answer to the question:

On the inegalitarian stance, only my stream of consciousness is genuine (read the first-person pronoun ‘sloppily’ rather than ‘strictly’, as referring to the reader rather than the writer). [...] The inegalitarian can answer the vertiginous question—or perhaps can explain why it shouldn’t be asked. Exactly one stream of consciousness is ‘live’; exactly one stream of consciousness is found in reality. So the question ‘why is this stream of consciousness (pointing to a bit of reality) the live one?’ gets the swift answer ‘it has no competition’. More emphatically: the only perspective on my stream of consciousness is my embedded perspective, and without two competing perspectives on my stream of consciousness, the vertiginous question can’t get asked. Why the premiss? The only stream of consciousness is mine and the only perspective from which consciousness is apparent is the embedded perspective from a stream of consciousness.

Answer 3

1. Normally a child learns to distinguish what belongs to his body and what not. The latter is the seed for the concept of an external world, while the first is the seed for the concept of “I”. Both concepts are anchored as a dynamic data structure implemented in the mental processes of the human brain.
2. The difference between you and me: Your concept of “I” is implemented in your brain, while my concept of “I” is implemented in my brain. From a first person view, you cannot experience my datastructure while I cannot experience your datastructure.

For a relevant model from the philosophy of mind see Thomas Metzinger: Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity.

Answer 4

OP: Why am I this particular conscious individual?

In one respect this question aims at a central mystery: the hard problem of consciousness, but in this case from consciousness's perspective where the OP wishes to know how his consciousness is connected to his body.

As Jo Wehler points out, consciousness initially has to learn to differentiate itself from its environment. (A task which when inadequately accomplished can cause splitting & projecting, whereby undesirable components of self are attributed elsewhere.)

So one learns that consciousness and body are paired. However, to spell it out in steps that could be inspected leads to an impasse.

The connecting mechanism – from consciousness's perspective – is for the most part invisible, unconscious and only intuitive, so a detailed presentation of connection will not be forthcoming. (In a similar way the place from wherever one's thoughts arise is also invisible. To a certain extent thoughts can be deliberately formed, but the root source of thought is deeper and unseen.)

From the other perspective, that of biological and cognitive science, consciousness can be considered as an emergent mental activity but a detailed knowledge of what constitutes consciousness is lacking so we cannot trace all the steps from body to consciousness.

In some respects one's consciousness could be more general and transpersonal but in an important way it is localised by attachment to a specific body.

So, without being able to go into detail, you are this particular conscious individual because your consciousness and body are connected; the detail of the connection is a mystery.

Taking the question more broadly: why is one one's specific body? Inspecting an indeterminate or infinite causal chain of procreation, evolution and cosmology is not going to yield a definite answer either. The most determinate thing one can say is "I think therefore I am, and I'm connected to this specific body which I am too." Or as Popeye would say "I yam 'cos I yam and that's what I yam!".

Answer 5

Both Mauro and Chris Degnen have good answers in the idealism direction.
Here is one more of the same vein.

Infant to Adult and back

Have you seen an infant grow up?

When we adults are in pain we say: “I am in pain!” Except when it becomes really painful and we reach the borders of consciousness and there are just screams, groans etc without mediating articulated language.

Likewise we express joy, anger, confusion... verbally. Or at most in actions.

For the infant it's unmediated by articulation, pure — gurgles, squeals, smiles, screams.

This is the first stage — pure consciousness.

Soon after, (6 months to a year) sounds start to be articulated which will later become:

• Ma
• Pa
• milk (I want!)
• cleaning (I need!)
• etc

Let's say the infant's name is "Matt".
It will be noticed that he says "Ma" and "Pa" before he says "Matt".

And he says “Matt” for a while before learning to say “I”

In fact it is very striking to watch how the young 'un gets confused how "Matt and Pa" become "You and I" sometimes and "I and you" sometimes.

This we may call the beginning of individuation — somewhere along the way between age 2 and 4 typically.

This clearing out which happens typically between age 4 and 6 is what we may call "particularization".

Still, until about 10 the child lives in a "naturally magical world", not quite grokking that thoughts do not move external objects on their own. We may call this a magical world because the child does not distinguish between my world and the common world.

When that distinction is confirmed, hardened and ossified we get an "adult" (so-called).

A few rare individuals (see Jung , Harding) find a way back in adulthood from the individualized, particularized thing-state to the pristine child state.

^{Most of the world's religions have a reference to that pristine state: Eden in Judeo-Christianity, Satya-yuga in Hinduism etc.}

^{And on rare occasions, found strewn across secular literature — The great English poet Wordsworth remembers his childhood.}

You may ask what this has to do with...

Your question

Why am I this particular conscious individual?

We assume that particularness and individuation are intrinsic and inherent in consciousness. It is not so as a careful examination of the state near the "ends" (both birth and death) would show.

When we learn to separate consciousness from a particular individual we may be able to access the only answers that can (properly) address the question: the Buddhist and the Vedantic. They sound opposite but are really complementary.

Buddhist

There is no self. There may well be experience. But there is no being who experiences — anatta (actually an-atma)

Vedantic

There is only self — atma. The whole world is a film-show of maya. But in fact there are no people, events, story. Just the screen remaining ever unaffected by the play of light.

Independent support for inegalitarian view

Mauro's answer talks of the "inegalitarian view". Here are some more evidences for the inegalitarian, idealist viewpoint.

1. Language

Verb	Inf	1st	2nd	3rd
eat	to eat	I eat	you eat	he eats
sit	to sit	I sit	you sit	she sits
etc
is	to be	I am	you are	she is

So while many verbs in English are irregular, to be is specially irregular.

And this special irregularity of to be is found across languages. eg. In German it is:
verb: sein, Ich bin, Sie sind, Er ist

To me this suggests that from the distant past people have understood that "I am" is fundamentally different from "He is" "This table is" etc.

2. State of Deep Sleep

In the Vedantic teaching, the pinnacle is considered to be the Mandukya Upanishad which contains little more than a recitation of the three states of consciousness — waking, dream, and dreamless sleep, the implication being that one who has understood these has understood all that is to be understood.

So what is the big deal about these particularly deep sleep?

The question is usually formulated pithily as: How were you in deep sleep?

For the physicalist this is a trivial question with a trivial answer: I was lying on the bed, snoring.

For the idealist however this is a highly non-trivial question. Because this does not work if consciousness is the root which generates the whole universe, and I was not conscious!

And yet we cannot say we don't exist because

1. A Matt does not wake up a Rushi (comes back to your question)
2. More significantly a really deep sleep has a sense of profound satisfaction without specific data, ie. memories: We know we exist(ed) but we cant say how. So this becomes an intimation of the child "pre-fall" state.

Answer 6

There's a fundamental misunderstanding here. When we ask "How or why am I this particular conscious individual?", we feel like we're asking an ontological question, when in fact it's merely an epistemological one. I mean, if we were to ask the question "How or why am I living in this particular house", there's no real mystery. We built the house, or bought it, or rented it; we chose it from a selection of available houses for a variety of practical reasons. There's no mystery because we think of a house as something that belongs to us, not as a feature of who we are, and we can think and remember the various steps that brought it to us.

Identity is really just another house we live in. We built it up over our lifespan, with parts bought and paid for by our blood, sweat, joys, and tears… Of course, we can't pack up and move somewhere else like we can with a regular house (though we can remake ourselves, with effort), but that doesn't change the fact that identity is a construct: a thing we own, not a thing we are. If we ask "How or why am I this particular conscious individual?", the only real answer is that this particular conscious individual is the conscious individual we made for or of ourselves.

Answer 7

> Why am I me and not someone else?

It's the same question as why is it today and not Tuesday, May 7th, 1652?

Because you chose to ask the question today, not 400 years ago. Formerly speaking, the date was symmetric with respect to time until you chose a date to ask the question and asked it. Similarly:

You're you and not me because you're the one who asked that question. I didn't ask that question. YOU chose to ask it. That was your choice and your free will, and you can't reasonably act bewildered by that.

Read Nietzsche about responsibility and choice.

Answer 8

A physicalist (reductive materialist) answer is that your consciousness reduces to what happens in your brain, and that ends up the way it does because of genes and environmental conditions.

So a particular "you" can't be a different "you" if you have the same genes and you were exposed to the same environment that resulted in the same brain development. And you would have been a different you if you had different genes or if you were exposed to a different environment.

If you lightly hit your head on something, that would make you a different you, although it would be much like the current you, except with a slightly sore head. More generally, who you are is constantly changing as you experience things and think about things, and as your brain and body develops and ages naturally, and as things physically happen to your brain and body, even if those changes are (typically) fairly small on a moment-to-moment basis.

Answer 9

I admit that this is a serious problem, but it does not mean that it is a complicated problem. In my opinion, the answer to this question is actually very simple: "I" is an "emergence," not an "arrival."

To put it simply, the "I" as the subject does not originally exist anywhere, whether it is heaven in the religious sense or the world in the practical sense. "I" is the result of a series of chemical reactions of matter that cannot be fully explained at present. "I" emerges from nothingness rather than being appointed by anyone to come into this world.

It's like a volcano erupting, it's underground molten rock that breaks through a weak patch of ground and spews out, rather than there being a hole there, molten rock chooses it.

Of course, this explanation is not entirely convincing, because we can't fully simulate chemical reactions to produce consciousness. If we can mass-produce fully self-aware robots in the future, the answer will be even more obvious.

Heidegger's philosophical system is amazing, but he sometimes makes some obvious mistakes. For example, he says that "people are pushed into the world," which gives the impression that the "I" originally existed somewhere like heaven or hell, and when the time was right, the "I" was propelled into the world by some mysterious force to begin a long (or very short) life.

This is actually similar to the heaven theory or the reincarnation theory held by most religions in the world, but they all have a self-consistent question: Why did I come into this world as me and not someone else? Religious theories can, of course, explain that this is the will of God or the actions of people in previous lives. But how to read God's will? How can past life behavior be known? Therefore, we cannot bring these theories into the realm of rational thought because they are unknowable.

Therefore, I think that if chemical reactions at the physical level and theological logic at the religious level cannot explain the emergence of the "I", then we can explain it with the help of Schopenhauer's theory of will: in the long and vast space and time, blind will drives matter to carry out various physical movements and chemical reaction attempts, over and over again. At a certain point, the chemical reactions and physical movements of matter give rise to consciousness, and "I" emerges in the world as one of the representations of the will.

Answer 10

If I go the beach and pick up a grain of sand, one can ask two questions

1. What is the probability that, given the seemingly infinite number of grains of sand on this beach, that I picked this particular one?
2. What is the probability that I picked a grain of sand?

The answer to the first question is almost zero, the answer to the second question is one. The difference is that for the first question I attach special meaning to this particular grain of sand. 100s of thousands of people are born every day. One of them happened to be you. What is the probability that you are you, given that you are you?

Answer 11

given the fact that there are many conscious individuals that exist, and given that I am one of these conscious individuals, how, and more importantly why, am I this particular conscious individual who has his lifespan in this era of the world and human history and who was born in that particular point in spacetime (when referring to the date and place of my conception)?

This question is much more trivial than you make it out to be. The answer is both logical and empirical.

First, the law of identity says that every thing is itself. If this law is true, then there is simply no logical possibility that you could be something not yourself, whatever that is.

Second, the question assumes something which makes no sense, namely that being someone is a totally improbable coincidence between one pre-existing consciousness among zillions of others, and one pre-determined body among zillions of others. This is delusion on a massive scale. We have zero idea as to what is consciousness beyond our experience of it, but whatever it is is irrelevant. What matters are our ideas, because, as we can all verify for ourselves, we are only conscious of our own ideas and nothing else. However, our ideas all rather obviously are the result of our personal experience of the real world, one which we acquire through our own sensory perception, which is itself a property of our own body. Each of us has only one body and consequently a unique vantage point from which to look at the real world because our body is unique. Bodies are unique because there is an exclusion principle à la Pauli: Not two human bodies can occupy the same region of space at the same time. Thus, we go through life developing a unique perspective, a unique set of ideas, a unique set of memories, and all along, at each instant, we can only have a unique experience of life because we experience every moment in the context of our own past experience. Thus, the uniqueness of our ideas, and therefore of the consciousness we have of our idea, is hardwired into the materiality of our body.

Such is life.

Answer 12

Because he's the one asking the question.

Answer 13

Because you are the result of your body plus enviornment and circumstances, and not a separate entity that might be attached to just any old body.

You have characteristics that are a direct result of your genetic composition.

You are "your body/brain/etc". Not removable from your hosting brain. A product of it.

Which is why you are you, not another.

Answer 14

Re "The vertiginous question: Why am I me and not someone else?" I can't see anything vertiginous in this. Neither that is a question that stands out from all other philosophical questions (Re: "the")

There are dozens of similar questions we frequently come upon, of the sort "Why something instead of nothing?".

I call this kind of questions "empty", i.e. they are devoid of any meaning and purpose. Some of them are also circular, like the present one: If I were someone else, I would ask myself again "Why I am me and not someone else?" ... Ad infinitum.

These questions are also characterized by this: they can accept a simple, obvious and indisputable answer, of the type: Because it couldn't be otherwise!.

Q: Why am I me and not someone else?
A: Because you are not someone else!
(or, simply, Because you are you!)
Q: Why is this an apple?
A: Because this is what it is, (an apple!")

All these responses --apparently naive "truisms"-- answer the question fully, don't they? And they are naive because the question is too and deserves such responses. And if we try to question them, we will inevitably get into a circularity, as I indicated in the beginning.

Now, there may be also an ontological aspect about this question --as some have pointed out in their answers-- which could make it somewhat more interesting. And that would certainly have to do with the concept of self. A subject that is so much discussed in philosophy ... However, I believe that taking this up will only lead away of the spirit of the topic as I sense it.

Answer 15

The vertiginous question fails the most basic requirements of the observation-selection effect

Personally, I don't find this question to be particularly vexing. To me it appears to be easily answered by a variant of the "observation-selection effects" examined by the philosopher Nick Bostrom in his formulation of the anthropic principle (also called the observation-selection effect). The most general form of the observation-selection effect is a simple manifestation of the rules of conditional probability --- it says that the range of possible observations you may make about the universe is limited by the relevant conditional information, including the fact that you are here and asking the question at issue.

The vertiginous question represents a failure of conditional reasoning, insofar as it refuses to condition on the observation-selection effect --- that you are here asking why you are you and not someone else instead. This is an example of the "stolen concept fallacy" whereby the observer asks for a causal explanation of a conditioning fact that is a requirement of their presence asking the question. When an observer asks "why" this conditioning state is extant, the answer is that if the conditioning state was not extant then they would not be here to ask the question. Thus, the question at issue implies the necessity of the state for which they seek an explanation.

The vertiginous question treats your consciousness as if it were a free-floating thing that could manifest randomly as the consciousness of any conscious being. The philosopher David Chalmers points out that this is an "egalitarian" stance that treats the consciousness of the observer as being on par with the (inferred) consciousness of others. In doing so, the vertiginous question gets things backwards epistemologically. It begins with the observation that there are many conscious being and then presents your own consciousness as some mystery to be solved. But in fact, it is the fact that you are conscious that lets you observe the world and conclude (on the basis of inductive reasoning) that there are other conscious beings at all. You are taking your own consciousness for granted in deciding that your inference of the existence of other conscious beings is valid.

Answer 16

The question is not a particularly useful one, provided one assumes that each self is unitary, and out of communication with other selves.

IF those presuppositions hold, THEN each one of us will be a unique self. If one adds in materialism/physicalism, then why you are "THIS" particular unique self -- has no answer. One will be SOME unique self, so why not THIS one?

But question the presuppositions, and then more options appear.

Assume that we are not a solitary unique self, and the possibility of superposition of multiple selves, whose memories are all identical up to a point, but then diverge, becomes possible. This concept is assumed in Everettian quantum universe-spitting, as an example of a physicalist worldview that embraces it.

Spiritual dualists often accept the existence of spiritual attachments, who carry along with a self as the self lives its life. Upon death, the attachments may separate from the core self, and then both with encountered can relate the same memory. Also, if a self is multiple not unitary, there can be IDENTICAL selves that are prepositioned during life, then split and live different lives post-death. Past life reincarnation therapists have encountered multiple patients who relate the same past life memory, and have resorted to either attachments, or superposition hypotheses to make sense of their patient's past lives.

Why one is "this" me, is still unclear from these POVs. Karma theories are an attempt to provide a further explanation.

Assume we are not actually independent identities, and instead blend into each other and the nature of selfhood gets very fuzzy.

The most clearly articulated versions of this are from the non-duality advocates, who hold that we are not actually a "me", that selfhood is a delusion. This is a core concept of much of Buddhism, of parts of Hinduism, and of the Perennial Philosophy.

From a materialist perspective Hume also argued that there is no self -- that "me-ness" is a delusion. So it is not just idealists or spiritualists who make this claim.

From the POV of non-duality, or of Humean "no-self", your question is nonsensical, and a result of succumbing to the delusion of selfhood.