(May 25, 2016 at 8:22 pm)Losty Wrote: Can anyone answer why I'm me.....and not a turtle?
By what method of determination do you experience existence separate from turtle experience; more to the point, what determined both my and the turtle's particular experiences and could one have been shunt in place of another (by what alternate means could turtle have experienced existence through my perspective or vice versa)?
Why at the market or the zoo, why this morning...why not exist a thousand years from now or deep in the ocean?
Can this ever be coherently approached or determined materialistically/scientifically? Or, is the true question "why is there no turtle in me?"
You are more complex than electrons (which have no individual distinctness), and thus your haecceity is a high-level (weakly) emergent property in the same sense that the deterministic behavior of molecular systems emerges from the indeterministic behavior of the quantum particles that comprise the system.
Why you experience existence as a non-turtle is, per mind-body physicalism, an accident of history, or pace mind-body physicalism, a mystery that will perhaps one day be explained when the Holy Shelled One departs from the Great Terrarium in the sky and bestows upon us Her mystic wisdom.
A Gemma is forever.
