Chaotic Awesome is a webseries hosted by Chloe Dykstra and Michele Morrow, generally focused on all things geeky, such as gaming and technology. But the good influence of correspondent Christina Ochoa ensures that there is also a healthy dose of real science on the show. It was a perfect venue for Jennifer Ouellette — science writer extraordinaire, as well as beloved spouse of your humble blogger — to talk about her latest masterwork, Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self.
Jennifer’s book runs the gamut from the role of genes in forming personality to the nature of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. But it also fits very naturally into a discussion of gaming, since our brains tend to identify very strongly with avatars that represent us in virtual spaces. (My favorite example is Jaron Lanier’s virtual lobster — the homuncular body map inside our brain is flexible enough to “grow new limbs” when an avatar takes a dramatically non-human form.) And just for fun for the sake of scientific research, Jennifer and her husband tried out some psychoactive substances that affect the self/other boundary in a profound way. I’m mostly a theorist, myself, but willing to collect data when it’s absolutely necessary.
Tony, I think most of us would delight in more than the mere several decades we have…but an infinite amount of time would be unimaginable horror, no matter how pleasant. Even uncountable trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years from now after the last black hole has evaporated and there’s nothing at all left, you wouldn’t even have made a dent in forever.
Worse, time ceases to have any meaning when you make the experience of it infinite. “Infinity” isn’t merely a really big number; it’s a different sort of “thing” entirely from anything countable. No matter how you slice it, it’s impossible to actually have an infinite number of anything countable — by definition!
To be sure, infinities are extremely useful in math and physics, and they accurately describe very real phenomena. But they function very differently in those contexts from individual countable entities of something.
And questions of the infinitude of an alleged afterlife aside, we can know with as much certainty as we know that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow that nothing of your consciousness survives death, save poetically in the recollections of others who knew you. Your consciousness is entirely a property of your brain; when your brain is gone or ceases to function property, your consciousness will go with it. Claims to the contrary are not merely as improbable as claims of a perpetual motion machine, they are equivalent such such a claim. We don’t know all the details of how the mind works, of course, but we’ve got enough of the outlines sketched out to know that there’s nothing magical about them.
Cheers,
b&