I will say yes, for the hell of it.

Are you claiming that if I join enough legs together, they will exhibit sentience?

Gotta draw a line somewhere. Why don't you define the Earth as the universe?

Nope. But this acknowledges if you join enough "stuff" together it's possible to get something that you didn't have before, and that understanding is sufficient to undermine your position completely.

I dont really see the point of defining the earth as the universe.

What is it about thoughts, desires etc that make you select them as a self, whereas other products or characteristics of an organism arent selected as a self?

What do you have that you didnt have before ( except for a word)? Im not seeing it.

An atomic explosion, which you admitted is a distinct phenomenon from a non-explosion.

I don't mean those three things in my long post to be an exhaustive list. It's like the question "at what point does the bottom of the mountain stop being part of the mountain?" It might be interesting to push at the marginal cases, but it doesn't mean we can't draw sensible - if somewhat fuzzy - boundaries.

Just as a follow-up to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

Sorry, still dont get it. If you want to say that there are distinct phenomenon, fine( although they are just concepts , words,and so dont actually exist as distinct phenomenon), but still nothing has been created or destroyed, which was what we were talking about in the other thread.

So you're now saying that a non-explosion is the same as an explosion? This is what I explicitly asked you about:

I'm not asking you about the other thread right now, I'm asking you about explosions.

At what point does the non explosion become an explosion?

From the conventional point of view, there are things, which are different from other things. I am questioning whether , although its useful to see things that way, its really how things work? Whether in fact, the things, and the difference from other things, is all just in our head.

neeeel, here is a hefty quote from Bruce Hood's "The Self Illusion: Why There is No 'You' Inside Your Head"

Why is he wrong?

Are you trying to say that there's no actual phenomenological distinction between an explosion and non-explosion?

It's not a matter of one becoming the other. It's a matter of whether the phenomenon are distinct.

I dont know, this is what I am asking. What do you mean by "phenomenological" and "distinct".


If you cant tell when one becomes the other, then being distinct is just an arbitrary line we draw... its all in our heads

Did you notice that your car has not-exploded between the time that you made your last post and now? Or are you not sure?

If this really mattered, you would have asked the first time I used those words. Now you're just hiding under a rock.

Nobody said anything about one "becoming" another. But if even if you insisted on this particular example, the explosion starts when the first self-sustaining particle decay occurs.

What is a particle decay? That's right... You think that photons and electrons are the same thing. Your viewpoint is incoherent until you can figure out what YOU mean by anything YOU say.

Because he is claiming that "the self emerged out of the bundling together of these experiences. "

There is nothing else other than the experiences there. The bundling together of the experiences is part of the experiences, if you get me. One of the experiences that you are bundling together is the experience of "this bundle of experiences is a self". Beyond thoughts of "I am a self" or "these experiences make up my self" there is nothing there. And those thoughts are part of the bundle. There is just a bunch of non connected sensations, thoughts and feelings, some of which consist of thoughts about being a self.

I guess if you want to claim that the idea of self came from bundling the experiences together, then fine( although there is nothing doing the bundling). But its just an idea, same as bundling together some land and calling it USA is just an idea.


We can label the bundling together of a whole load of trees as a forest. Did a forest emerge out of the bundling together?

TIL forests don't exist.

I suspect there's an irony in there somewhere.

I dont own a car


ok. Or you could just provide your definitions

You are not in a position to get snippy about this.

Neither myself nor Hood are claiming that there is something "other" than the constituent brain processes/experiences etc. Look again at the diagrams I made upthread. What you are saying is directly equivalent to "there is no water, just hydrogen and oxygen atoms".

What do you mean they are non-connected? What neuroscientific model of the mind are you basing your claims on? To me it just sounds like you have a pre-scientific model of the mind.

Nothing doing the bundling? It just happens by magic? Are you a dualist?

Do forests exist?

It seems to me you looking at hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and saying "look, water"



I dont necessarily believe that such a thing as a mind exists.
By non connected I mean, that theres no existing inherent entity , such as a mind, or a self, that is existing across all the sensations and thoughts. That a feeling of pain now, is unconnected to any previous feeling of pain. That there is no experiencer of pain, and no experiencer of pain that exists across two separate sensations of pain.


no specific inherent entity doing the bundling. in the same way that there is no specific inherent entity doing the raining.

that obviously completely invalidates the point.

neeeel: 1
aaron: 0

Why the obsession with "inherent entities"? The whole point of that Hood passage is that there is a theory of self-as-an-inherent-entity (the 'ego' theory) and a theory of self-as-not-an-inherent entity (the 'bundle' theory). Given that you claim neither theory refers, and make the same claim for things like forests, can you fix the following argument:

P1) A forest is not an inherent entity
P2) ???
C1) Therefore forests do not exist.

I'm sure I've asked you this before, but can you name a few things you think exist?

e.g.

Quarks?
Atoms?
Molecules?
Neurons?
Dollars?
Economics?
Thoughts?
Baseballs?
Prime numbers?

I'd call it a flawless victory, if I believed that victory existed (I mean, show me this 'victory'!).

Points don't exist. You can't tell when 0 becomes 1.