Surreal experiences
For those of you that are older than 16, have you ever had the chance to meet some person who knew you when you were a baby and has never seen you since? Have they marvelled and felt you up and wondered at how much you'd grown into a handsome man/beautiful women? In any other situation it would be considered harrasment, but because you exist in their memory as a baby they used to know, it somehow excuses it :P
It's incredibly surreal however, the feeling of someone knowing who you are, but you not remembering them at all. I mean, I'm sure they're there SOMEWHERE in your brain... it's big enough to everything in your life 15 times over. The fact that you exist as one thing in their brain, while their existance only exists as a part of a brain neuron buried somewhere in your brain, it's a weird feeling really.
Brings one to think about the philosophy of Berkeley... the whole the world only exists in our minds kind of thing. Now Berkeley was a Christian, and so he postulated that the reason that the idea of an objective reality exists is because we are all figments of God's imagination (which is an amazingly cool idea, although I don't know how much I agree with Berkeley). If we exist in these people's minds as a baby, are we then babies? But since we exist in the minds of others as an adult, are we then adults? Are we babies and adults AT THE SAME TIME?!?!?! (That's why I disagree with Berkeley :P)
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John,
The comments are warping my ability to post the links I want.
The question you ask was the subject of a conference that I attended at the University of Idaho a couple of years back. The conference, titled "Time and Identity" looked at various theories in the philosophy of time that have been posited to explain how it is that some being x at time t can 'change' over time and still remain x at t+n, even when x at t+n little resembles, (or for that matter, is even composed of the same matter) x at t.
While most philosophers reject Berkelean Idealism on epistemic grounds (his claims are fundamentally impossible to establish and connect to the world as we know it), the question of whether we are babies and adults at the same time, can be answered in the affirmative if one takes a B-Theory of time (that is to say that time is ordered by two-place relations like 'earlier than', 'simultaneous with' and 'later than' rather than talking of 'future' 'present' and 'past') and cojoins it with the Einsteinian notion of time as the fourth dimension and whats called Perdurentism. At the risk of making an ass out of myself due to my very limited knowledge of such material, I would direct you to the , rather than explain Perdurentism in this short little blurb. After I returned from the conference, where I presented a paper on the distinction between A Series time and B Series time, I wrote a little summary of the various positions in the philosophy of time; it can be read here. The SEP article is much much more thorough than my own little write up, so if you are interested in issues concerning identity and time, you should definately check it out.
For what ever reason, when the comments are published, they are twisting the HTML commands. The first link, which goes from the comma through the word 'read' is the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philoshy's article on Time. The second, which is just the word 'here' at the end of the highlighted link, is a link to my little summary.
Sweet Peter. Man it's pretty cool that you decided to parse through my blog like this.
Ahaha.. oh man, I'm going to have to read those articles you've posted. That should be insanely interesting.
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