Ourcellves? (Identity)

by romansh , Saturday, April 12, 2014, 15:44 (3877 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: Sadly, we do seem to have great difficulty communicating! The context of our discussion was that if we are nothing but our cells (the materialist view), it is a false dichotomy to claim that our cells control us and therefore we have no free will. If our cells ARE us, logically we/they control ourselves/themselves. In your response you wrote:-Our we talking about materialism or your your logic for ourcellf?-The way I see your logic works is:
1) Lets define the cells in [our] bodies as our cells 
2) The metabolism of our cells which results actions, consciousness etc can be described as ours
Therefore ... It is perfectly reasonable call our collection of cells, actions consciousness etc as ours of a self-I have no problem with this is a sloppy, casual pragmatic way. Language has forced me to describe my thoughts and ideas as mine etc. ie Dualistically-But in a deeper philosophical and rigorous way I think this whole dualistic position is a nonsense. Just because I might use words, symbols, pictures to describe chemistry it does not mean chemistry is these things.-Again going back to the supposed view that materialists think there is nothing but our material self. A materialist would argue that material things respond to cause and effect. ie a photon does not have a mass but responds to gravity.-If we were to positively identify some "magical" energy (for a want of a better word) that is our supposed consciousness, this would be no problem for a materialist, she would just add it to the menagerie of energies that already exist. What would be a problem for a materialist if this magical energy was truly magical and was not described by the first and second laws of thermodynamics. -> Although I had not suggested that YOU had suggested we were (just) our cells, it seemed that your comment might shed an interesting light on the subject under discussion (free will), and so I asked you to explain what aspects of ourselves could not be subsumed under the activity of our cells. You replied: "Much more = the universe". And I can only repeat (sadly) that this leaves me none the wiser about whether or not we have free will or, in a wider context, what is the nature of the self.-The nature of the self (like free will) is that it is not what it seems.
Our responses to the universe do not intrisically appear within the brain (choose whatever organ you feel comfortable with). It took the universe to make ourcellves and ourcellves unfold the universe. This is part of GK's feed back if we like.-Also if our cells don't come from the food we eat ... where does it come from?