Where am I?

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I've been reading books by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter as part of my fascination with the subject of consciousness. Dennett published an interesting thought experiment on the philosophy of mind titled Where Am I?. This is a good primer for the kind of thought experiments that let us "play around" with the parameters that govern our sense of self and our relation to the world we experience.

I'd be curious to know if anyone else is interested in this kind of stuff, and whether we could have a discussion about it here.

Wasn't Dennett influenced by Gurdjieff, or am I thinking of someone else? I have a good friend who is interested in everything Gurdjieff.

I just read an article on it on the internet. And saw the first part of the movie. It was so crazy! Weird! Interesting! I can't even really describe it, except that it's go that paradoxical, convoluted, philosophy-ish feel to it. I wonder what will happen when we actually develop the technology to do something like that?

Gurdjieff was an interesting character. In some senses, even though his non-scientific approach was the polar opposite of Dennett's, his interests and some of his essential ideas were broadly similar.

I should say straight away that I subscribe fully to Dennett's kind of materialism on the basis that I can see evolution by natural selection being sufficient as an explanation for the organization of all living things however, the raw materials at nature's disposal for this exercise are not yet fully understood and therefore many mysteries still remain.

I think the level of reduction we've gotten to so far is already pretty impressive. Studies by Garner et al.and Liu et al. have now achieved artificial memory formation and recall in lab animals and the function of some nervous subsystems of insects have been duplicated in out-board electronics so I think it's perfectly appropriate to consider some of the implications of thought experiments along the lines that Dennett and Hofstadter have written about. To save any confusion, by this I mean that I can accept that if the functional components of my brain were carefully migrated, one by one, to a different physical substrate - then there would be no point at which I would lose consciousness or memory etc. but may actually have been "teleported" to someplace else. If this much can be accepted, then the fun begins

physicsnut42: What was the movie you mentioned?