Speaking of your computer...

"Freespirit" comments on my "How did you decide…" post:

But doesn't this line of thinking also call into question the very existence of the actual self that I am experiencing at this moment?

I certainly hope so! I've spent more hours (we're talking 1,000's!) looking for "myself" during meditation and dyad exercises, working with Ramana Maharshi's question "Who am I?" Thus far, nobody home. The insight that goes by such mystical names as 'enlightenment' and 'satori' is often conceptualized by the word 'emptiness'--the conviction that there is no self.

Freespirit continues:
If there is no self inside me, no conscious will making decisions, then what am I but a bunch of particles of matter that just happened (or, of course, didn't just happen, happened because of certain circumstances) to be collected in this spot. And if that's true, what differentiates this bunch of particles from the air surrounding what I call my arm, or the object I call a computer?

Well, for one thing, the ability to ask that question! I'm a materialist--I do believe that it's all about particles of matter (read: atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, sulphur) being assembled in such a way to create alive, self-aware beings. This is the gist of what John McCrone was saying (my previous post "Where I start from"). As far as what differentiates you from a computer--this is the "Mr. Data" question--if you build a computer that seems to be conscious, and says it's conscious, is it conscious?

One approach to this question is to suppose that neurosurgery has advanced to the state where individual neurons can be replaced with artificial ones--imagine neurosurgeons of the future physically replacing, one by one, the damaged neurons of an Alzheimer's patient, say. After the surgery, the patient says they're feeling great, they're fixed!

Can you do this indefinitely? Can you replace all of someone's neurons with artificial ones and still have a self-aware being? I would say, "Well of course!" Especially if the being with the now-synthetic brain insists that they're self-aware, and are, in fact, the same person they were before the operation!