Identity is indeed elusive. I tend to think of myself as a process too, i.e. a braid of selfupdating information embedded in space-time (did that make any sense? (-: ).
What puzzles me the most is the permanence of identity despite the siscontinuity of the conscious experience. Why and how am I still the same person in the morning than I was when I fell asleep?
One could argue that the abundant neural activity that happens during the night preservres yourself...
What about deep phenobarbital-induced general anesthesia, which induces a flat EEG? No more neural activity... Your self is preserved through the "structural" properties of your brain.
Which leads me to another point: the structure/function distinction is a false dichotomy, an artefact of the human thinking process. The concept isn't new for the many Lisp hackers around here, but the idea can be extended to the organisation of the universe. The (neuro)psychologist's structure is the neurologist's function. Recurse up to elementary particles whose dual wave/particle nature has been extensively documented.
Physics will not be complete until the nature of subjectivity is understood. It may never be complete, for that matter.
What puzzles me the most is the permanence of identity despite the siscontinuity of the conscious experience. Why and how am I still the same person in the morning than I was when I fell asleep?
One could argue that the abundant neural activity that happens during the night preservres yourself...
What about deep phenobarbital-induced general anesthesia, which induces a flat EEG? No more neural activity... Your self is preserved through the "structural" properties of your brain.
Which leads me to another point: the structure/function distinction is a false dichotomy, an artefact of the human thinking process. The concept isn't new for the many Lisp hackers around here, but the idea can be extended to the organisation of the universe. The (neuro)psychologist's structure is the neurologist's function. Recurse up to elementary particles whose dual wave/particle nature has been extensively documented.
Physics will not be complete until the nature of subjectivity is understood. It may never be complete, for that matter.