Perdurantism

About a year back I was daydreaming and began pondering identity. Looking back at the person I was as a child, or even as a teenager relative to who I am now, I can surely say that although I retain some behavioural traits I am overall a different person. I started framing the question to myself from the perspective of an animated character. In classical animation, a character is drawn and redrawn multiple times per second to give the illusion of motion. Putting myself in the animated character's shoes, I then imagined each new frame (drawing of the character at a different location in time) as a new identity, or a related but new conscious entity. From each frame's perspective, it is, has always been, and always will be the being inhabiting it's particular physical form. The reason it should believe this is because it has access to information from the past that has all happened revolving around the body's location in space, and it currently inhabits that same form. Just as each animated character at each frame in time believes it has always inhabited the body it calls home, for the simple reason that it has access to information from that body's past, so too do people. As I was saying before, I'm not the same person I was as a young child. I believe the physical state of the brain that made up that conscious identity no longer exists and is therefore, dead. I only believe that that identity was me because I can remember events that happened to it, from it's perspective in space. The same will be true in the future. The man i am now will slowly fade into the man I will become and what I am today will cease to exist. But whatever comes next will have all the knowledge available to it, and inhabit the same point in space as I once did, and thus will believe that it and I are the same thing. The view I'm taking as I later found out, is a sub-group of Perdurntism known as Exdurantism (Stage Theorists). Exdurantism claims that things exist only in temporally discrete parts. A quick quote from wikipedia to clarify

Stage theorists take you to be identical with a particular temporal part at any given time. So, in a manner of speaking, a subject only exists for an instantaneous period of time. However there are other temporal parts at other times which that subject is related to in a certain way (Sider talks of 'modal counterpart relations', whilst Hawley talks of 'non-Humean relations') such that when someone says that they were a child, or that they will be an elderly person, these things are true, because they bear a special "identity-like" relation to a temporal part that is a child (that exists in the past) or a temporal part that is an elderly person(that exists in the future). Stage theorists are sometimes called 'exdurantists'.

This seemed to be a particularly hard post to articulate, but I hope I have gotten across the gist of the idea I'm trying to portray.

Colour Perception II

The notion that we all see the colours in the same way seems obvious. What i perceive as green is identical to what you perceive as green. But how can we know for sure? An interesting video that discusses this topic can be located below by vsauce on youtube. To perhaps shed light on the subject, I suggest an experiment. My hypothesis is that colour vision evolved to help our ancestors identify food primarily. If this is the case, then the colours as we perceive them should be optimised to making things like fruit stand out against foliage or other various environments. To start, we could have our control image be a normal picture with unchanged colours be presented to a series of subjects. They would then have to identify as many potential food sources as possible. Next, the image could be adjusted so that all colours are rotated by the same amount around the colour wheel in the same direction by x, preserving the relative locations of each colour to each other colour contained in the image. This would be repeated multiple times and various subjects would repeatedly attempt to identify potential food sources. I believe the results would show that the optimum capability for finding food would hover very near the colours as they appear in the control image. The conclusion that could be drawn is that evolution has whittled down those who did not sense colour in the way the majority does because it is not as effective. This could be backed up by brain scans of people who would be shown colours in an MRI machine. If the scans matched significantly, it would show the same perceptual process is being undertaken by each individual. In summary, the reason my red is the same as your red, as well as our greens and all others being the same is because this maximises contrast between food and non-food, whereas people who aren't able to perceive colour like you or me where less effective at finding the necessary food. Vsauce Colour Perception Video

Mary's Room Part I

"Mary's Room" is a thought experiment designed to show the limitations of physicalism and the inability of any theory based on physicalism to adequately describe subjective experiences known as qualia. The experiment goes as follows: A woman named Mary is locked in a completely monochromatic room where anything visible to her is only visible in black and white. She spends her entire life studying optics and electromagnetic theory until she knows all there is to know about light. The argument then is, if she knows all there is to know about light, does she know what the colour red looks like? If she knows all there is to know about light, then surely she should not be shocked when she is released from her room into the full colour world the physicalist argument would espouse. But what Frank Jackson put forward (the man who conceived the experiment) is that despite all her hard work learning about every aspect there is to know about light, no matter how much factual knowledge she accumulates, she cannot capture what it is to experience the colour red, and should therefore be in awe at seeing it for the first time. In summary, no matter how much she learns she can never factually know the sensation of redness, or any number of subjective experiences, and thus physicalism is incomplete. My rebuttal of this view is as follows: Although she has learned as much as she can about light, one crucial piece is missing, and that is a complete knowledge of neuroscience. Lets instead imagine that we give Mary a little bit more time in her tucked away room before we release her and she teaches herself all about neuroscience as well. She learns that as light enters the eye it elicits various nerve impulses depending on a variety of factors. In our case we'll focus solely on colour perception. Mary finds that when the wavelength of light commonly referred to as red is detected, it sparks action in a set of particular neurones. Mary proceeds to build a device capable of stimulating those neurones in her own brain and for the first time beholds the colour red! Mary concludes then that "redness" can be identified as a collection of information that when processed by the brain in sum leads to the sensation of red. The Mary's Room argument in an attempt to show the incompleteness of physicalism, I believe demonstrates that it itself is not complete because it leaves out the very crucial physical process that the observer herself must complete to fulfill the experience. Thus the experience itself remains firmly within the physical realm.

Beyond Science

There are many ways people try to divine the "truth" from the world. This will open a can of worms but the scientific method seems to take the cake in the dishing out of accurate facts. What I'm interested in briefly talking about though is what the dichotomy between acceptable methods before science, and then after it's actualisation were, and inevitably how that may reflect on the future. It can be argued that the elements of what would eventually become the scientific method existed prior to their collection and labelling as a whole as science. Apart though, the array of philosophies weren't nearly as effective as they are used in tandem (falsifiability, empiricism, objectivity, etc.). Nobody anticipated the future existence of the scientific method. There wasn't a person saying, "wouldn't it be great if we had science, and this is how it should work". It's creation in itself was a process spanning many years and careers. Now comes the thought experiment. Is science as good a method as we can get? Or could a superior system yet be in the making? Ironically it will probably be science itself that leads us to it. I invite any readers to throw down some ideas in the comment section on ways that you think could improve any piece of the scientific method, or perhaps augment it to improve any of it's aspects. In this case we are all just speculating and no better off than my hypothetical dreamer from earlier on. But I find it fascinating to imagine the possibility of something just as revolutionary as the scientific method was in it's time, happening again in the future, and how it would expand the horizons on the limits of knowledge and what is knowable. This discussion is also in no way meant to knock science in anyway. I have the utmost respect for it and all of the amazing knowledge and advancement it has brought humanity. I realise I haven't added much to the conversation. This is an area I haven't really explored. I'm more looking to incite brainstorming, or even just spark an interesting idea.