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I am laying on a massage table when this idea starts to unfold in front of me.
It comes about as I notice how odd a collection of parts my body is. The masseuse presses on my right hip and I become aware of the interaction of connected pieces - hip, leg, back, muscles, bones, sockets, tendons - me.
All parts of me. None of them me.
Yet, I am not completely me without any one of them.
Remove a fingernail from my left hand, or a finger, or the hand itself, and I wouldn’t say I am any less me. But the sum total my experience of self is, at that point, objectively different than it is with those pieces. Non-normative, but certainly non-null.
I will never draw my hand across the surface of the ocean or feel the breeze across a fresh paper cut in the webbing of my thumb.
I think this says something interesting about the notion of the hard problem — it is no more possible for me to fully know what it is like to be a bat than to know what it is like to be me without a finger.
But this does not mean that the subjective first person perspective is something spooky and unknowable, it is just that it can only be implemented as a singleton.
The subjective experience can only ever be experienced in a unitary state. If we were to feel the exact same thing we would need to be the same instance.
The platonic form of Love/Sadness/Transcendence/Suffering (insert any phenomenal notion) doesn’t actually exist. It can only be fuzzily defined by the shared aspects of our idealogical specification. But it can be implemented to some degree in our problem space. These coarse-grained instances of the concept are what actually exist.
And in bringing to bear this existence, the thing that truly matters to us arises.
A computational paradigm seems to suggest that since these subjective experiences certainly seem to exist that they inherently have specifications.
The instance is an implementation of the specification (on a particular substrate).
In the substrate of spacetime (or whatever underlies that), I am the instance of the specification of the idea.
And so is everything else.
The fascinating dynamic that separates the idea-that-is-me from the idea-that-is-a-rock is the loop that affords the me-idea to be aware of the me-idea.
It's this self-referential loop that seems to introduce the ability for an idea to influence itself, to evolve, to self-direct.