LESSWRONG
LW

All of BGFloyd's Comments + Replies

Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
BGFloyd00

I cannot imagine myself as a helium balloon. I can imagine a helium balloon and attach the label "me" to it, but this does absolutely nothing for me in terms of self-image or emotion.

Attaching the label "me" to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?

I don't understand how feeling like you're in the wrong body manifests as suffering.

Me either really. It just hurts when I notice it. You may as well ask how feeling a wound on your flesh manifests

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0TheOtherDave
I can't speak for Liza, but what I mean when I talk about thinking of myself as my body (though I'm more likely to use the language "identifying with my body") is something like attending to the experiences that come from that body. The extent to which I do this varies greatly; in particular, in certain forms of meditation I attend to those experiences to the exclusion of almost everything else. That said, if I've been doing a lot of that sort of meditation in a short period of time, I find that my default level of identifying with my body changes without reference to how much attention I'm actually paying at that moment. (It's also true that my default level of attention changes, but that's a separate issue.) So "I'm identifying a lot with my body" can either describe a right-this-moment altered state of my attention, or a more broad frequently-over-the-last-few-weeks altered state.
0Liza
I really don't know. Perhaps my ability of introspection is inferior to yours. All three. It exists at every level of abstraction. If I try to ignore it, the aversions and restlessness do not go away.
Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
BGFloyd00

I don't understand how feeling like you're in the wrong body manifests as suffering. If I woke up as someone or something other than what I feel like I am, I would react positively or negatively on a case by case basis. Whether my self-image matched my body would not be at all relevant.

If you were transformed into a being with no sexual characteristics at all, say, a magical non-anthropomorphic helium balloon, would you expect your suffering to be abated or partially abated or unchanged?

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5Liza
Me either really. It just hurts when I notice it. You may as well ask how feeling a wound on your flesh manifests as suffering. The thought experiment is nonsensical to me. My brain would not be able to consider that my body and if it were modified to be able to do so, the method by which it were modified would entirely determine the effect. I cannot imagine myself as a helium balloon. I can imagine a helium balloon and attach the label "me" to it, but this does absolutely nothing for me in terms of self-image or emotion.