The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality (2016)
Let&#x27;s pretend a thought or experience is in fact just memories, or rather recombinations and interactions of memories.<p>The word &quot;remember&quot; [as in &#x27;recall to mind&#x27;] is etymologically composed of &quot;re-&quot; [as in again, over time] and &quot;memorari&quot; [&#x27;being mindfull of&#x27;].<p>Instead of focussing on consciousness, let&#x27;s focus on the &quot;first-person&quot;-ness.<p>Everyone else is an &quot;I&quot; too...<p>Imagine [part of] your memory is dysfunctional in a similar way to amnesia. You are playing chess, and write down the moves on a piece of paper with some &quot;private&quot; notes like &quot;beware of the horse on E5&quot;. After every move, your nurse turns the chess board and notes around, and &quot;reminds&quot; you with &quot;it is your turn&quot;. You forgot you were black a few minutes ago, and then you forgot you were playing white after and so on. You would insist you don&#x27;t have amnesia: indeed by looking at your paper you can &quot;recall&quot; every move, and how you felt about the moves.<p>In physics forces and fields fall as 1&#x2F;r^2 or faster (say dipoles). So as _I_ (your &quot;I&quot; or my &quot;I&quot; alike) evaluate how _I_ the universe could move say this electron, or fire that neuron, we predominantly take into account the &#x27;local&#x27; information. So we all are under the impression that we are merely part of the universe, instead of an amnesiac decision process on the total universe.<p>Even though we don&#x27;t, suppose we all agreed with the statement &quot;I am the universe&quot;, are we in agreement, or total conflict? Or is it only a paradox: a linguistic illusion of contradiction?<p>Edit: I lost the cadence of my comment: intead of re-member to indicate carrying information over time, we could call the subjective &quot;first-person&quot;-ness here-member, carying information across space [but falling offf quickly]...