[davidm]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

The connection is that consciousness is not only an individual expression of you, as you are now (and this is where Clark and Stewart agree)...

Well, I'm gobsmacked, peacegirl. So far as I can recall, this the nearest you have ever come to admitting error. So now you ADMIT that Clark and Stewart agree with Lessans, at least to a point. I can assure you all three are in entire agreement. You could contact Clark and win support at least for this part of the book!

The ideas being propounded here are not that hard to understand; whether they are coherent is a different matter. Clark explains it by differentiating between personal subjective continuity and generic subjective continuity.

"Personal subjective continuity" is the sense of always being and having been present, and of being a particular person with his/her own consistent set of memories and experiences that constitute a personal identity. It's what Lessans means when he writes that while alive, "I" can never be a "someone else," so to say, because my personal subjectivity, this sense of "I" is the only perspective through which I can view the world.

Clark (and Stewart and Lessans) argue, though they use different words (I'm going to use Clark's words now) that upon death, personal subjective continuity is replaced by generic subjective continuity, and the sense of "always being present" continues in a different personal context. That is why, to boil the idea down, earlier I wrote something like:

1. "I" go to sleep at night with a set of memories that constitute myself (personal subjective continuity).

2. "I" go to sleep the next night with the same set of memories, plus those of one more day (more personal subjective continuity).

3. "I" die the next night, and personal subjective continuity comes to an end. It is replaced by generic subjective continuity, and "my" next awareness is that of a newborn dimly struggling into existence. I am using "I" and "my" loosely here, as Clark also notes in his own explanation, since indeed, under this idea, the next conscious awareness after death is not that of the previous "Me," which is gone, but of a new locus of awareness. The problem is that in trying to explicate this idea, we don't have any personal pronoun that encompasses both personal subjective continuity and generic subjective continuity, so the best we can do (or I can do) to differentiate between them is use the personal pronoun I without quote marks to stand for personal subjective continuity, and the personal pronoun "I" with quote marks to denote generic subjective continuity.

Perhaps it could be better stated without recourse to personal pronouns: There is personal subjective continuity, in which a person experiences a certain stable identity over time. At death, there is generic subjective continuity, in which a new personal subjective awareness comes into existence to replace the old one.

If people really want to discuss this idea seriously, rather than just taunting peacegirl, I suggest, again, e-mailing Clark and alerting him to this discussion. I am quite confident he will agree that Lessans' argument is the same as his, and perhaps he can better explicate the idea.

I wonder, though, why anyone would find this idea (if it is coherent, a big if) comforting. It's not like reincarnation, in which some essential, irreducible part of you, usually called a "soul," simply leaves the dead vessel and takes up residence in a new vessel, guaranteeing some tangible continuation of yourself. And of course under most notions of reincarnation, good works in this life mean your next incarnation will be even better. However, also under many Eastern traditions, the ultimate goal or teleos of the many and varied reincarnations is to escape the wheel of life and of its inevitable suffering and to achieve Nirvana -- literally, to snuff it out: snuff out consciousness, or at least individual consciousness, and perhaps become part of some world soul or world consciousness.

But this stuff that Lessans, Clark and Stewart are propounding is completely different. Since there is no personal connection between the various lives, it follows that "you" (not literally you, keep in mind, because we are using the term loosely, in quote marks, to denote generic subjective continuity as opposed to personal subjective continuity) in one life will be a king, and in the next "you" will be a pauper. In one life "you" will be brilliant, and in another a moron. In one life "you" will live in a lap of luxury, and in another "you" will be confined to a gulag where the henchmen of a dictator will torture "you" with electric shocks.

This is comforting?

I know why peacegirl thinks it's comforting. She thinks that eventually Lessans' utopia will be established, and everyone will live in eternal bliss, a secular version of the Christian story. What I've no idea is why Clark finds it comforting, as he does.

Another thing that neither Lessans, Clark nor Stewart address is this: assuming generic subjective continuity is a coherent idea (Stewart calls it "existential passage,") why does the locus of awareness shift from one individual human consciousness to another? Why doesn't it shift to a bird, a beetle, a dog or an alien on a distant planet?