Posted by alexandra_k on July 30, 2005, at 20:10:27
In reply to Lost - for Alex and anyone else interested, posted by cricket on July 28, 2005, at 15:57:53
>Back to the question of whether I am another alter or just a connector
Okay, lets go back to that...
There is the social and physical environment...
And there is your body / brain which also has a genetic inheritance...
And the meeting of those two things produces your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, goals, desires, memories etc.
You experience some of them consciously.
Those things are mental contents.
The contents of your mind.
The contents of consciousness
The things you are conscious of.Nobody is conscious of everything going on inside them all at once.
Attention is a little like a flashlight and it can only 'light up' or focus on a little area at a time.So sometimes you can access some contents - but not other contents.
Its about making the contents more accessible.
You could say the self is a function from mental contents to behaviour (including verbal behaviour - what you say)
You could say that if the set of mental contents is radically different at different times then there are numerically different functions from mental contents to behaviour (in the sense that each alter or collection of consciousness constitutes a different self). Or you could say that it is the same function and it is just the content that is different.
I don't think a lot hangs on this...
Either way it is about being able to move that torch around a little more freely to get more of a general picture as to what is going on inside the body. And more info has got to be a good thing...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:534847
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050725/msgs/535816.html