rationalskepticism.org

DavidMcC wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:...

To make a measure of 'fleeting'; let's see.

My memories are not completely trustworthy for one. They tend to get edits on viewing. There's that.

It depends on whether you mean short term memories or long term, and how long it's been since the event in question.
Thus, a short term memory is completely untrustworthy in the long term, whereas a long term memory is relatively stable (but not competely reliable.

Next they are untrustworthy in that they imply a fixed 'me'. Like a solid ship sailing through life. I attach the 'Michael' tag to the hull of the ship. But I just imagine this sort of thing. Not that it don't exist. Just like there are trees in the world there is a singular form called Michael that probabilistically hovers around a bag of proteins and blueprints for about one hundred years. 24463 days thus far.
...

It doesn't matter that your cells (including brain neurons and their synapses) are constantly dying and being replaced the long term memories usually survive, because long term memories consist of duplicated (paralleled-up) neural connections, that survive the loss of individual ones. f course, they don't survive forever, and you sometimes forget even long-term memories, especially when you're old.

Getting distracted by what I said on reliability isn't going to help you here. I probably should have left that out. On Mondays and Wednesdays I usually say memory is very reliable. Somedays I think it's reliable on Sunday too. Do you See? When it comes to making a fat subjective judgement like 'memory is unreliable', it really doesn't matter which way we swing.

The second part. The ship sailing through a life. That's the important part of this selfless business.

But here again it's all about subjective judgements. I can say I have a self or not depending on which way the wind has me swinging. Bottom line? If thy 'self' offends then then pluck it out!

Surely, the reliability of memory (which is strongly dependent on the time elapsed and the strength of the memory) is open to scientific testing by psychologists and neurologists? It is not a matter of your opinion whether you remember something (at a given time) or not.