The Process History Fallacy

That the self cannot be reconstructed or resurrected because it would be impossible to recreate the historical events that lead to the fully developed self.

That certain steps in this process of self development are lost like animal traks on the ground are as other animals tred over them and cover them with their own.

Some say that it would be impossiblie to recreate the self because either; computers cannot calculate such large numbers and that certain steps in the process of self formation are lost and could not be reconstructed.

How long could the deficiency in computer capacity persist? If the last 100 years of technological development were used as a standard, can we even imagine how muchcomputers will be able to do in the next 100 years. Or what about in a thousand years? If the human race can succeed in not becoming extinct in the next 10,000 years what will computersbe like then? Will they be something that would even be called computers or a distant anscestor to what we have now?

Process Fallacy 3; History At this moment your brain is in a set of states. The activities of nerve cells are creating you now and this, with the ability to gain access to all of the possible memories that you can have at this moment. If this self is a result of all the activities taking place withing the brain the pattern of neuronal connectivity allows this self to roam the BWW (brain wide web).

If the pattern of connectivity is all there is to it, it would seem an easy task to reconstruct it. But this assumption is often met with the counter assumption that; in order to recreate this present structure we would have to make the artificial structure go through the history that the original structure went through. (Recreating all of the steps that the individual went through during their entire life.

But if the individual experiences continuing moments and has access to most of his or her memories,would't this be reflected in the arrangement of nerve cells in the small space just beneath the skull bone? If it is currently impossible to determine the state that each of the large number of nuerons in the brain are in, how long will this situation persist? All of us tend to be tech forcasters on this one, whether the answer is affirmative or negative. Given the rate of technological development, will we bump up against the limits of measurment during the next couple 1000 years?

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the history of the self's development is impossible to learn, because it is lost in the process of the self's development.

Suppose, also, that any act of self awareness depends upon a repetitive recapitualation of the lost process and that this process itself is impossible to map out or reduce to representitive numbers.

The question immediatly comes to mind; does the structure of the brain contain the elements that create this recapitualation, which, again for the sake of argument, is required for every act of self awareness? The brain must contain the structures and possible states that somehow activate this recapitualation.

As stated above it seems that over a long enough period of technological development that we will learn how to map the entire brain, understand the state of every nerve cell - during one moment, reduce this to a calculation, and then feed this information into an awaiting and moldable, fully artificial human brain.

It seems that this artificial brain would recapitualate this lost portion, of the self's history, without the programmers having to know anything about this lost history. It would simply run this lost history, that cannot be calculated, simply from the arrangement of the nerve cell equivalant units, once set in motionand going through the next series of moments, as the nerve cells in your brain now seem to find this thing that was -lost?-

Suppose two people are given identical jigsaw puzzes. The images they are to construct from the many small pieces are identical. They are sent each to seperate rooms and instructed to put the puzzles together in any that they can; they must choose their own methods. Both individuals are then observed putting them together and as it turns out each used an entirely different method for fitting the many pieces together. After a time both puzzles are completed. THE PROCESS HISTORY FALLACY --- asserts that the self could not be constructed unless the entire history of the individual were repeated. But this does seem rather similar to the two people putting the puzzles together. In order for this anology to hold water though there would have to be some sort of pro and con sides on the issue of which one of these two peoples puzzles were constructed in the HISTORICALLY CORRECT manner. Both puzzle seem to be completly together and display the same large image yet on is the puzzle and one is not??

MUSIC It is similar with music. Which peice of music is the original? How can one version sound like the other when the process of creating the peice is long gone? Is the original peice the first time that it was played by the originater or are the people who play the completed song playing the CURRENT ORIGINAL piece, even though they know nothing of what the person who created it went through.

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