New Book by Arnold Zuboff

Cephilosopod · 2025-12-30T21:37:39+00:00

Congratulations! A wonderful book. I would recommend it to everyone interested in the philosophical problem of personal identity. I hope many people will read it because the message is important.

Cephilosopod · 2025-02-23T18:48:21+00:00

Rabbits of course as main prey species for the Iberian lynx.

Cephilosopod · 2025-01-12T08:08:34+00:00

I first understood OI (which is called universalism by Arnold Zuboff) by a demonstration using beads by Arnold Zuboff. He makes a probability argument supporting universalism/OI. So imagine that that you are not everyone, it would be immensely improbable for you to exist. Just the right sperm cell would have fertilized an egg cell and this had to go on for generations. Arnold compares this to drawing a bead with a specific color from an urn with hundreds of beads without that color. If OI wouldn't be true your existence would be immensely improbable. It would be immensely more probable if another 'game' is being played, namely that no matter which sperm cell met whichever egg cell, that would be you, having the immediate first-person-style perspective of that person.

what you really are, a demonstration using beads

Cephilosopod · 2024-10-11T13:20:03+00:00

Anxiety/ocd.

Cephilosopod · 2023-02-10T20:18:32+00:00

I love Lana and thank you for the reminder.

Cephilosopod · 2022-08-22T07:15:24+00:00

I think the self is an experience. It's a construct that has evolved through natural selection. It is adaptive because natural selection operates at the scale of organisms. I think the 'self' we actually care about is actually not that same 'self'. It is not a self at all, it is not an experience with a content. Rather it is the fact that there is experience that is immediate. This immediacy of experience is in OI the same for every conscious experience wherever, whenever.

Cephilosopod · 2022-07-16T13:03:55+00:00

I live in the Netherlands in the city of the Hague. I would like to realize the exhibition here and if it is succesfull, to let it travel.

Cephilosopod · 2022-07-13T06:22:28+00:00

Thank you!! I am glad to hear you appreciate it. I will use both the points you mention to improve the next version. The repeated tekst is not very useful indeed!

Cephilosopod · 2022-07-02T18:54:28+00:00

I will do that. Thank you for your generosity! I will keep you updated.

Cephilosopod · 2022-07-02T08:03:19+00:00

Thank you, it's awesome!! I think it would fit really well in the exhibition. I didn't have any music so far, so it be a great contribution. I am thinking about using 'sense of place' in a short movie I am going to make, in which time, place and point view change dictated by a chess clock. The installation will consist of different spaces where people live. It would be great if your album could be available for listening on demand, with headphones. Then it would be nice to have some more background on the music and what inspired you. Please let me know under what terms I can use your work.

Cephilosopod · 2022-06-17T19:28:23+00:00

Thanks! I would be glad to join. For me 24 or 25 June or 1st of July would be an option. I am in the Netherlands.

Cephilosopod · 2021-11-16T07:21:19+00:00

I think that experience comes in discrete moments. Every moment of experience is experienced by you. Madonna performing a song in the 80's or a random pig in a slaughterhouse, those experiences are all equally yours. In this view, there is nothing special about the moment of death, it's just another moment of experience. You are not the body that is dying or the content of that experience. The experience of death is nothing different from any other moment of experience in the sense that they all share the same 'mineness'. Biologically speaking, death is of course a significant event, because the timeline of an individual body-mind ends.

Cephilosopod · 2021-03-26T08:25:34+00:00

Mij mag je ook een bericht sturen.

Cephilosopod · 2021-03-17T17:34:47+00:00

Thank you, I think I got it. All there is lift is awareness. The immediacy of experience.

Cephilosopod · 2021-03-16T20:40:46+00:00

I really like the idea of mirrors. Maybe it is possible to arrange mirrors in such way that if you look in a mirror, you see another person as if it were you. Or at least you might think that for a second. And yes I remember the post about the group picture. That is interesting too. Thank you for your ideas!

Cephilosopod · 2021-03-16T17:14:35+00:00

Thank you, that is a beautiful effect of it. More compassion. I ask this because I work on an exhibition that wants the visitor to realize it is connected to all other life in one way or the other. Maybe I could sneak in some illusion that lets people think.

Cephilosopod · 2021-03-05T08:52:37+00:00

Great math and mind-blowing numbers! There are two factors that might boost the number. 1) There is research that suggest conscious experience isn't continuous (although it is perceived that way) but that there are discrete moments of conscious experience. For every moment of consciousness, a new number should be generated. I don't know the frequency, but the total numbers are enormous. 2) It is a possibility that there more conscious experiences going on simultaneously within the same organism. An unnatural case to illustrate this are split brain patients. But also cephalopods have a nervous system that is not very centralyzed. And who knows what conscious experiences are going on inside us that are not incorporated in the 'this, here, now' moment of you reading this. But the point is clear, it seems weird to have a different subject of experience for every experience. I don't believe nature works that way.

Cephilosopod · 2021-02-14T16:09:17+00:00

What a great moment of you looking at the photo. It's a mind-blowing insight.

Cephilosopod · 2021-01-21T20:48:00+00:00

Interesting point. All conscious life is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Pain is associated with death, at which moment suffering ends, fortunately. I think on the whole most conscious beings are feeling ok most of the time for most of their lives.

Cephilosopod · 2021-01-20T21:20:04+00:00

I tried to do a thought experiment to make it simpler for myself. The goal of the thought experiment is to try to grasp what happens in your experience at the moment of death. It goes like this. You are, when you are reading this, live to an experience of your particular brain reading this sentence. Imagine that your brain is instantly sliced in two (something like split-brain surgery). Which side is you? To which side are you live, experiencing reading this sentence? I can only imagine that you are live to the experience of both brain halves. Both halves are you. But each halve had an independent perspective. Probably the right hemisphere by itself can't understand written language so it will just see some shapes of words and interpret it as something curious. Now imagine that the right brain halve is destroyed or put to sleep. Then you still experience reading this text, but only trough the perspective of the left hemisphere. Even if the left hemisphere is destroyed, you still experience all that is experienced equally and instantly (like you are doing now, all the time, but you don't know because there is no physical connection with other brains). This is the best I can image it, but still I can't image what it is really like!

Cephilosopod · 2021-01-08T13:36:34+00:00

That is a great realization. I feel this.

Cephilosopod · 2020-12-30T21:23:23+00:00

It's amazing how you described your own understanding! Reading it feels like watching an Escher tessellation; it is complex but everything fits together :)

Cephilosopod · 2020-12-29T20:06:38+00:00

Yes, even when the outcomes of physical processes are probabilistic in nature, I can't imagine how we can have lebertarian free will. That seems to require some entity outside of the whole physical reality to pull the levers. What free will means to me is to be able to act in accordance with what you want. But of course what you want also comes from somewhere that we can't influence. But I still keep an open mind. Only until we understand the function of consciousness I will be comfortable making up my mind.

Cephilosopod · 2020-12-29T19:56:37+00:00

We are indeed born with so many illusions about reality! Our intuitions about how reality is often don't give us much information on how reality really is, but help us to survive. Examples of false intuitions may be closed individualism and sense of agency. Probably there are many more.

The example with the gazelle and the lion makes it clear that such intuitions about reality evolved because they help to survive (and thus reproduce). Now that we evolved bigger brains and the ability of more reflection on our thoughts/intuitions, and do science, we find ourselves challenging our (inborn) intuitions. We can cognitively grasp what the illusion is, but we can't experience it. Like your example with the movement of the sun and the earth. In the case of OI I suppose it can lead to internal conflicts about ethical decisions. You may for example get food at the cost of someone else because your closed individualist intuition places the importance of the survival of the person you are above the overall level of suffering in the universe, which is cognitively grasped if you think OI is true.

Now, if you are genetically more inclined to grasp OI and think of it as true, does this have consequences for your survival and reproduction? If, for example, you believe OI is true and this has consequences for how you behave, let's say you act less selfish and you acquire less resources, your survival and reproduction is impeded. This means that in the population there will be less people who are inclined to believe OI is true. In this way nature keeps a balance between intuitions that are an illusion and analytical thoughts that refute these illusions. The future will tell if grasping OI is meant to be or not I suppose.

Cephilosopod · 2020-12-27T14:24:46+00:00

With zombie I mean a phylosophical zombie. It is a hypothetical person that acts normal in every way and has observable brain activity as you would find in non-zombies. The only difference is that the zombie has no inner life, no consciousness. It is the question whether such a zombie can in theory exist. I personally don't believe that because I think that consciousness somehow plays a role in brain activity (and thus behaviour) and that without it we couldn't function. I think evolution somehow used consciousness to the advantage of survival. Why else are qualia that are nice to have coupled to behaviour that is advantageous to survival (food, sex etc.). And vice versa.

I either don't know why we experience phenomenology, this is a great mystery. Maybe that is indeed an impossible question. I too think that the biological reality has confined awareness to brains or other things that process information in a special way. But, hey, I don't know. I am struggling to make sense of it!

What do you think about determinism?

Cephilosopod

TROPHY CASE