The Illusion of the Self

[hiyymer]

Dropping by and seeing this very interesting "serious" thread. Would recommend to anyone interested in the subject the book, "Self Comes to Mind", by Antonio Damasio. It's about brain science, but I do remember one interesting passage which was kind of a side note. He described the complex behaviors of a one-celled animal (an amoeba if I remember right) and how it maintained its homeostasis in the face of changes in its environment. He then observed that an amoeba has an apparently ferocious will to live, despite the fact that it has no brain at all. That's as far as he took it. It made me think. An amoeba is a collection of biological mechanisms and there is no apparent decision central in an amoeba. An amoeba clearly has no "I". So from whence comes this "will to live". Is it a material property of the amoeba? Or does the amoeba's will to live exist only in the immaterial world of our consciousness? When we scientifically deconstruct the amoeba into the mechanism of its evolved form, we see that it exists because it exists. It is a product of natural selection. It does not exist because any part of it "wants" to exist. The amoeba as agent is not material reality, nor an "emergent property". The amoeba can continue to be an amoeba without the benefit of our need to make it a "will-er".

Consciousness is an evolved mechanism as well. Agency is a convention of the brain, a product of evolution. It is not an idea, although we may have ideas about it. It is like colors. There are no colors in material reality; only patterns of light. Colors are a convention of the brain. We do not "choose" to see colors, or to experience a self. The hard part is that we cannot think without the certainty that the "I" is the source of our thoughts. "I think therefore I am" declared Rene Descartes. Antonio Amasio wrote another book, before he wrote "Self Comes to Mind". It is called "Descarte's Error".

[JimC]

To me, a non-sentient organism's "will to live" is simply a projection of our own conscious mind, attempting to describe a set of objective phenomena about the organism in a way that makes sense to our own created, illusory self...

I agree with you that consciousness is evolved. Rather than a mechanism, I consider it to be a tool of the brain, a set of thoughts and emotions about "self" which make acting in survival mode in a dangerous world that much easier...

(only a semantic shade between mechanism and tool, I suppose...)

[hiyymer]

To me, a non-sentient organism's "will to live" is simply a projection of our own conscious mind, attempting to describe a set of objective phenomena about the organism in a way that makes sense to our own created, illusory self...

I agree with you that consciousness is evolved. Rather than a mechanism, I consider it to be a tool of the brain, a set of thoughts and emotions about "self" which make acting in survival mode in a dangerous world that much easier...

(only a semantic shade between mechanism and tool, I suppose...)

Tool works. The trouble with talking about the brain as if it had tools is that the brain is not an agent either.

[FBM]

...The trouble with talking about the brain as if it had tools is that the brain is not an agent either.

Ah. Well said.

[JimC]

To me, a non-sentient organism's "will to live" is simply a projection of our own conscious mind, attempting to describe a set of objective phenomena about the organism in a way that makes sense to our own created, illusory self...

I agree with you that consciousness is evolved. Rather than a mechanism, I consider it to be a tool of the brain, a set of thoughts and emotions about "self" which make acting in survival mode in a dangerous world that much easier...

(only a semantic shade between mechanism and tool, I suppose...)

Tool works. The trouble with talking about the brain as if it had tools is that the brain is not an agent either.

True, but it is the seat of all the biological activity which in some way generates all the cognitive phenomena we are discussing. For any given human, being successful in a Darwinian sense could loosely be described as a "purpose" (albeit not in the same sense as an everyday purpose we may have, as in the purpose of my trip was to buy a packet of screws). The brain and its activities are crucial to this broad purpose...

[hiyymer]

True, but it is the seat of all the biological activity which in some way generates all the cognitive phenomena we are discussing. For any given human, being successful in a Darwinian sense could loosely be described as a "purpose" (albeit not in the same sense as an everyday purpose we may have, as in the purpose of my trip was to buy a packet of screws). The brain and its activities are crucial to this broad purpose...

Someone once said that evolution has no purpose. Back to the amoeba. What is the amoeba's purpose? Perhaps to maintain a state of homeostasis? Is that a purpose, or the reason there is an amoeba? The mechanism evolves by natural selection. Does that mean its purpose is to survive? Or is "purpose" just another name for "will", another way in which our brain drags in the agency model?

[JimC]

True, but it is the seat of all the biological activity which in some way generates all the cognitive phenomena we are discussing. For any given human, being successful in a Darwinian sense could loosely be described as a "purpose" (albeit not in the same sense as an everyday purpose we may have, as in the purpose of my trip was to buy a packet of screws). The brain and its activities are crucial to this broad purpose...

Someone once said that evolution has no purpose. Back to the amoeba. What is the amoeba's purpose? Perhaps to maintain a state of homeostasis? Is that a purpose, or the reason there is an amoeba? The mechanism evolves by natural selection. Does that mean its purpose is to survive? Or is "purpose" just another name for "will", another way in which our brain drags in the agency model?

The type of purpose I implied is akin to Dennett's "free-floating rationale", and is significantly different to our everyday use of the word, with its association with achieving a planned goal.

Given that organisms which "have what it takes" in a given environment leave a higher proportion (on average) of surviving offspring than less well adapted organisms, we are tempted to use a teleological description of their behaviour as a kind of short hand. As long as we recognise this as a shorthand for an evolutionary dynamic, it seems like a reasonable approximation. On this basis, whatever emergent elements of cognition (such as consciousness) that can be seen as contributing to the survival of an individual can be assigned a "purpose"

[FBM]

I agree, Jim, but there are always a few (like me) who are not satisfied with reasonable approximations if there are data that can resolve the situation with greater accuracy and clarity. Not saying that absolute accuracy and clarity are possible, mind you. Only relative. Nor do I knock the reasonable approximation itself; I live according to it most of the time. But when I'm really investigating the phenomenon of Self, it's not satisfactory.

[rasetsu]

Dropping by and seeing this very interesting "serious" thread. Would recommend to anyone interested in the subject the book, "Self Comes to Mind", by Antonio Damasio. It's about brain science, but I do remember one interesting passage which was kind of a side note. He described the complex behaviors of a one-celled animal (an amoeba if I remember right) and how it maintained its homeostasis in the face of changes in its environment. He then observed that an amoeba has an apparently ferocious will to live, despite the fact that it has no brain at all. That's as far as he took it. It made me think. An amoeba is a collection of biological mechanisms and there is no apparent decision central in an amoeba. An amoeba clearly has no "I". So from whence comes this "will to live". Is it a material property of the amoeba? Or does the amoeba's will to live exist only in the immaterial world of our consciousness? When we scientifically deconstruct the amoeba into the mechanism of its evolved form, we see that it exists because it exists. It is a product of natural selection. It does not exist because any part of it "wants" to exist. The amoeba as agent is not material reality, nor an "emergent property". The amoeba can continue to be an amoeba without the benefit of our need to make it a "will-er".

Consciousness is an evolved mechanism as well. Agency is a convention of the brain, a product of evolution. It is not an idea, although we may have ideas about it. It is like colors. There are no colors in material reality; only patterns of light. Colors are a convention of the brain. We do not "choose" to see colors, or to experience a self. The hard part is that we cannot think without the certainty that the "I" is the source of our thoughts. "I think therefore I am" declared Rene Descartes. Antonio Amasio wrote another book, before he wrote "Self Comes to Mind". It is called "Descarte's Error".

Hiyymer! I ran across one of your old posts the other day and wondered where you'd wandered off to. I missed you.

Dennett seems to be of the notion that the self would be that center which all our activity would point to if our activity had an actual center to point to. His 'Intentional Stance' is an analogous idea. I'm of the belief that the self actually exists, but then that's not a popular viewpoint these days.

Has this thread derailed into "The illusion of a serious discussion" yet?

[JimC]

My use of "reasonable approximation" was very specific to the use of the word purpose as a shorthand for "contributing to evolutionary success". Certainly, there is a vast area of exploration and refinement required in any exploration of "self", ranging from clarifying the semantics of the words we are forced to use to communicate our experiences, to the fine neurological details that underpin all these phenomena.

Essentially, what I will not give up is the contention that consciousness has a material, biological basis, and that this foundation means that whatever "self" is, it is not a ghost in the machine, but a dynamic part of human cognition that is not without an evolutionary rationale. Having said that, many features of organisms can accrete complexities that, as long as they are selectively neutral, are not adaptations in the true sense of the world. Aspects of our subjective experience of life could easily contain elements with somewhat random antecedents...

[FBM]

I don't see anything to disagree with there, Jim.

By the way, just to reiterate something I mentioned earlier, and was also mentioned in the video on the previous page, saying that the Self is 'illusion' doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Only that its existence is different from what we (behaviorally) conceive it to be. A movie projected onto a theatre screen gives the illusion of 3-dimensional space and beings, but it's actually light on a 2-dimensional surface. Something exists/is going on there, but when we let our minds participate in the story, we participate in the illusion. On one level, we know that it's a movie projected onto a screen, but we suspend that knowledge and get into the movie.

Wrt the Self, seems that a lot of people resist the idea that the physical reality is the body and its activity (analogous to the projection on the 2-D screen) and take the characters in the movie (Self) as real in ways that can't actually be demonstrated. Or, at least, haven't yet been. To my knowledge.

Illusions definitley exist. As illusions.

[JimC]

I don't see anything to disagree with there, Jim.

By the way, just to reiterate something I mentioned earlier, and was also mentioned in the video on the previous page, saying that the Self is 'illusion' doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Only that its existence is different from what we (behaviorally) conceive it to be. A movie projected onto a theatre screen gives the illusion of 3-dimensional space and beings, but it's actually light on a 2-dimensional surface. Something exists/is going on there, but when we let our minds participate in the story, we participate in the illusion. On one level, we know that it's a movie projected onto a screen, but we suspend that knowledge and get into the movie.

Wrt the Self, seems that a lot of people resist the idea that the physical reality is the body and its activity (analogous to the projection on the 2-D screen) and take the characters in the movie (Self) as real in ways that can't actually be demonstrated. Or, at least, haven't yet been. To my knowledge.

Illusions definitley exist. As illusions.

100% agree...

It is not about the non-existence of the Self, but how it is so tempting to falsely interpret it as an internal homunculus, firmly at the controls of the good ship JimC...

[FBM]

100% agree...

It is not about the non-existence of the Self, but how it is so tempting to falsely interpret it as an internal homunculus, firmly at the controls of the good ship JimC...

One thing that interests me about Buddhist philosophy is that Siddhartha dissected and dismissed the concept of a "Self" (absolute, discrete, singular, eternal as either soul, essence or homunculus) so long ago, though he never denied the self (useful fiction/convention), thereby avoiding both extremes of eternalism and nihilism. Maybe if he hadn't been compelled to wrap his empirical philosophy in a religious envelope he might be more widely seen as a great philosopher instead of some sort of guru. But, of course, at that time at that place, his ideas probably wouldn't have survived without a religious institution to propagate it.

[JimC]

100% agree...

It is not about the non-existence of the Self, but how it is so tempting to falsely interpret it as an internal homunculus, firmly at the controls of the good ship JimC...

One thing that interests me about Buddhist philosophy is that Siddhartha dissected and dismissed the concept of a "Self" (absolute, discrete, singular, eternal as either soul, essence or homunculus) so long ago, though he never denied the self (useful fiction/convention), thereby avoiding both extremes of eternalism and nihilism. Maybe if he hadn't been compelled to wrap his empirical philosophy in a religious envelope he might be more widely seen as a great philosopher instead of some sort of guru. But, of course, at that time at that place, his ideas probably wouldn't have survived without a religious institution to propagate it.

At least, as religious institutions go, the way it was framed made it considerably less likely to cause harm than the other major religions...

[FBM]

100% agree...

It is not about the non-existence of the Self, but how it is so tempting to falsely interpret it as an internal homunculus, firmly at the controls of the good ship JimC...

One thing that interests me about Buddhist philosophy is that Siddhartha dissected and dismissed the concept of a "Self" (absolute, discrete, singular, eternal as either soul, essence or homunculus) so long ago, though he never denied the self (useful fiction/convention), thereby avoiding both extremes of eternalism and nihilism. Maybe if he hadn't been compelled to wrap his empirical philosophy in a religious envelope he might be more widely seen as a great philosopher instead of some sort of guru. But, of course, at that time at that place, his ideas probably wouldn't have survived without a religious institution to propagate it.

At least, as religious institutions go, the way it was framed made it considerably less likely to cause harm than the other major religions...

Oh, definitely. But it also has become a woo-magnet to so many in the West.