Do you think that the individual units of thought are distinguishable between people?

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 07:37:43

when you have a complex thought process, you invoke a wide array of concepts into a full Thing. The processes that individual people use when thinking vary widely, but generally it seems that people think through the association of traits in an abstract space.

Are the individual building blocks, the traits, being used the same (same here being defined as "cannot be told apart") between people? or are they merely similar? how could we tell the difference?

If they cannot be discerned from one another, I would be inclined to think that they are identical. A person is defined by the process which they assemble concepts through relation of traits. I mean, a person is also a bunch of other stuff, but like.

You would not say, a man with amnesia is a different person than he is without amnesia. Because the concepts are lost, but he has retained his processes. And processes change, you do not think the same way that you thought when you were five, but 5 year old you is still you. So a person is a range of reasonably approximate processes.

What is interesting about this is that you could take any process, and use it as the center of your approximation of "sameness", and you could keep shifting the goalposts, over and over, until you have a wholly different process, a wholly different person.

Everyone is the same person. Variations on a theme. This sounds absolutely ridiculous of course, it makes no intuitive sense. Obviously, you and me are different people. But, maybe this is because "intuitive sense" was not developed for thinking about this sort of thing?

Anonus · 2016-01-19 07:39:46

write a book and Warner Bros. Books will publish it

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 07:39:51

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 07:47:59

i need a better framework for my thoughts, i pull them out of my brain and they kinda collapse like a castle made out of gelatin

i mean, im working on it, reading stuff, thinking a lot

and i've gotten better at it?

Anonus · 2016-01-19 07:53:20

sure

Haven · 2016-01-19 07:59:29

Today is Tomorrow said:
If they cannot be discerned from one another, I would be inclined to think that they are identical. A person is defined by the process which they assemble concepts through relation of traits. I mean, a person is also a bunch of other stuff, but like.

The most stable definition of "personality" over time is basically a person's series of "if-then" statements, so this is a pretty reasonable statement.

As for the rest, I would say that "everyone is the same person, variations on a theme" is true only at a species-wide level of granularity, in that we all have the same underlying biological impulses (breathe, eat, drink, eliminate waste, avoid pain, etc.). It might be more useful as a concept in a culturally bound state, where people are given the same narratives (say, on the largest scale, Capitalism is Great) and driven by their response to or incorporation of those narratives.

But even then, within a culture, people are exposed to substantially differing narratives and may have radically different responses to them, especially considering the channels through which a response can be expressed are greatly varied and, for almost everyone, constrained.

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 08:06:46

my point was that, it would be technically possible, through a large series of small, discrete transformations, to literally change one person into another person

which is not to say that such a thing is practically possible or desirable

Haven · 2016-01-19 08:20:02

It's certainly possible on a superficial level--see the chameleon effect, or less temporarily, friends picking up each other's speech patterns. I don't think it's possible on a deeper level than basic behavior, much less on the level of cognition (because you would have to filter out subjectivity for the idea to even make sense, and losing subjectivity means stopping short of the level of "personhood" you're talking about, I think).

But even if it was possible to enact what you're talking about on someone, you'd ultimately still end up with a meaningfully different person because of inherent differences of perspective and biology. Differences in height, weight, sensory acuity, manual dexterity, etc. would assert themselves, leading them to handle different situations in different ways, ultimately creating meaningful divergences through their interactions with physical reality. Even if you did it to twins, they wouldn't be exactly the same simply because, by virtue of occupying distinct positions in space, they would have different perspectives and therefore different experiences.

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 08:30:14

but, if you accept that there are multiple variations on a person that would be acceptable as that person, then you end up with a blurring in the boundaries between people

like, in the field of infinite hypothetical persons that could possibly exist, people are are distinguished through gradation, not through discreet points. Like, if you were to take a perfect model of my cognition, and a model of your cognition, you could morph one into the other, and i cannot think of a point where the models between the you and the me are definitely you or me.

And I would say that people do pick up and assume the parts of one anothers cognitive apparatuses quite often, through a process of reconstructing their processes empathically, then integrating them into how they think, much in the way friends pick up one anothers speech patterns.

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 08:35:17

At least, that does seem to be the case in my experience

also, i am talking about hypotheticalness here, disembodied minds. Like, imagine processes, recorded statically, not actual flesh people. flesh people are my nature not transformable into one another, for the reasons you yourself mentioned.

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 08:37:34

I guess i just think about this a lot because due to the fact that at some point i ended up with multiple, semi-integrated processes, that both came from the same place but are now sufficiently distinct to warrant separate consideration

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 08:39:36

which would heavily imply that through subtle drift from a core process, two things that are still the same, but different can emerge.

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 08:56:59

so really, I guess I'm just being self-centered here, taking myself and extrapolating onto everyone else

oh well

Anonus · 2016-01-19 09:03:23

Today is Tomorrow said:
so really, I guess I'm just being self-centered here, taking myself and extrapolating onto everyone else

story of my life

Obā-san · 2016-01-19 09:04:08

I wonder to what degree that can be escaped/avoided

Tachyon · 2016-01-19 15:53:18

maybe you don't avoid it, maybe the illusion of having done so is generated when enough other people identify with your extrapolations?

but that only happens if the extrapolations are sufficiently vague, or in the company of sufficiently like-minded people

on topic, i thought this was an interesting concept, but i don't think i have anything to meaningfully contribute

Klinotaxis · 2016-01-19 16:35:06

Whatever qualia things you're talking about seem impossible to externally discern in enough detail to make judgments about sameness etc.

One-Winged Eagle · 2016-01-19 16:51:23

Klinotaxis said:
Whatever qualia things you're talking about seem impossible to externally discern in enough detail to make judgments about sameness etc.

One-Winged Eagle · 2016-01-19 16:52:18

Also, people are probably more than their thoughts, body, and memories. Not in the sense of the imperishable soul, anyway.

Tachyon · 2016-01-19 17:02:46

There's social identity, i guess.

i can't think what else there would be, at least not which is externally discernible. i tend to take 'soul' to refer to something along the lines of consciousness, otherwise i don't think i have one.

Tachyon · 2016-01-19 17:49:23

i should read more about qualia

i feel like, there have to be some commonalities, right?

Like, take the idea of the number 7. One person might be a gambler, might associate it with good luck or wealth. Another might have synaesthesia, and associate it with a particular colour, let's say green. They both have quite different ideas of what kind of an entity the number 7 is, perhaps. But they're both going to be in agreement that 7 + 7 = 14 and 7 - 7 = 0 and 7 * 7 = 49 and 7/7 = 1. So something in there is the same. The idea might be different, but you can isolate a particular aspect of the idea that is identical. And this doesn't just work with numbers, but also logical expressions, or anything that can be represented as a formalism of that kind, you can very rigorously demonstrate that the concept behaves the same way when 2 different people use it.

It's harder to do this with ideas like 'horse' or 'telephone' or particular colours, but we're still able to hold conversations about these things.

Klinotaxis · 2016-01-19 18:40:11

personally, i think that mathematical concepts are so "artificial" and regimented that they're not relevant to how people think in general.

"generally relevant in general", what the fuck is wrong with me.

Tachyon · 2016-01-19 18:50:08

Fair enough. i just seized upon numbers because they seemed like a convenient example, but i can see how math is maybe sort of separate from how we think about most things.

Odradek · 2016-01-19 21:42:09

My non-thought out position is that selfhood is defined by a set of conditions(unity of apperception, social acknowledgement as a determinate person, continuity of memories, being/having a body that is always at one place at one time) that don't all need to be present in order to make someone feel like "the same person" but which do work together to create the sense of being "the same person"

Do you think that the individual units of thought are distinguishable between people?

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