The Illusion of the Self

[charlou]

I agree we should be careful not to slip down the slope of writing people off, due to the possibility they may still exist somewhere in there.

But that's kinda tangental to the topic .. and heading into ethics. I suppose you're aware of that, though. I'm just thinking aloud.

I think the question of whether you are still "you" when unconscious - whether asleep or in a coma - is directly on target for this thread.

I was responding to the 'be careful' comment. I'm also aware I may have read more into that phrasing than you intended by it.

[Warren Dew]

Do you think a puppy or a prion or a grasshopper experiences the illusion of a self?

If my earlier conjecture is correct, I think a puppy probably does. I think a prion does not, at least not at any level that would be recognizable to us. I'm not so sure about a grasshopper; the coherent behavior of some insects is no more complex than that of some computer programs, and according to my conjecture, if the grasshopper is conscious, so are those computer programs.

Of course, at the opposite extreme from my previous conjecture, perhaps only some humans are actually conscious and the rest only behave as if they were conscious. I can remember when I first encountered the problem of consciousness, in a discussion with a Catholic friend who saw it as an argument against atheism. At the time I completely missed his argument. Possibly I just wasn't paying sufficient attention to the words, but it's also possible that I wasn't actually conscious back then, so I lacked the experiential background to intuitively grasp what he was getting at.

Of course if having actual consciousness causes an experiential background, that implies that consciousness isn't pure supervention, which raises more questions.

[GrahamH]

And, I may be mucking up the waters here, but if I were in a persistent vegetative state, or otherwise severely brain damaged but still able to live (in advanced dementia, perhaps) I'd still be/have whatever it is that is my Self (I know, Warren, that makes it sound like a thing. But I think we have been referencing it as functions, grouped together under the general rubric or purpose as Self.) But I don't feel as though "I" would exist anymore.

I don't think it was me who objected to the terminology. I know what you mean.

However - are you "you" when you are asleep and not dreaming? I think we should be careful about people in comas or persistent vegetative states, as there are cases of their waking after many years:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... years.html

Sometimes they are conscious of some of the things that go on around them, even if they show no outward sign of understanding, as with this woman who had learned something of 9/11 in the middle of her two decade coma:

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500178_162-757388.html

More evidence that just because people can't tell us what they are experiencing, does not mean they aren't experiencing anything:

http://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpres ... rroudings/

Hm. I see what you're getting at, but it's a little different from where I was coming from.

Let me see if I can phrase it better in a hypothetical--
If my self is a collection of functions performed collaboratively within my brain (and other parts of my body), then I would agree that my self is still my self whether waking, sleeping, in a coma, etc., barring really excessive damage to the apparatus.

However, if I were to start acting while physically awake the way I do while I'm asleep (if that's even possible to picture, given the different paces of functions and types of functions my brain and body carry out, but run with me, if you can), I don't think I'd be the same person. I'm pretty sure my friends and family would think there was something deeply wrong about me, perhaps even something absent, that would make me effectively a different person to them.

I don't understand what you mean. If you acted as you do when sleeping then you would appear to be asleep, even if you were awake and experiencing your situation. Isn't this a sort of locked-in syndrome?

The opposite situation is if you act as if awake, but you are not experiencing your situation. Then we have a Philosophical Zombie or, possibly, a sleep walker.

[hadespussercats]

And, I may be mucking up the waters here, but if I were in a persistent vegetative state, or otherwise severely brain damaged but still able to live (in advanced dementia, perhaps) I'd still be/have whatever it is that is my Self (I know, Warren, that makes it sound like a thing. But I think we have been referencing it as functions, grouped together under the general rubric or purpose as Self.) But I don't feel as though "I" would exist anymore.

I don't think it was me who objected to the terminology. I know what you mean.

However - are you "you" when you are asleep and not dreaming? I think we should be careful about people in comas or persistent vegetative states, as there are cases of their waking after many years:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... years.html

Sometimes they are conscious of some of the things that go on around them, even if they show no outward sign of understanding, as with this woman who had learned something of 9/11 in the middle of her two decade coma:

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500178_162-757388.html

More evidence that just because people can't tell us what they are experiencing, does not mean they aren't experiencing anything:

http://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpres ... rroudings/

Hm. I see what you're getting at, but it's a little different from where I was coming from.

Let me see if I can phrase it better in a hypothetical--
If my self is a collection of functions performed collaboratively within my brain (and other parts of my body), then I would agree that my self is still my self whether waking, sleeping, in a coma, etc., barring really excessive damage to the apparatus.

However, if I were to start acting while physically awake the way I do while I'm asleep (if that's even possible to picture, given the different paces of functions and types of functions my brain and body carry out, but run with me, if you can), I don't think I'd be the same person. I'm pretty sure my friends and family would think there was something deeply wrong about me, perhaps even something absent, that would make me effectively a different person to them.

I don't understand what you mean. If you acted as you do when sleeping then you would appear to be asleep, even if you were awake and experiencing your situation. Isn't this a sort of locked-in syndrome?

The opposite situation is if you act as if awake, but you are not experiencing your situation. Then we have a Philosophical Zombie or, possibly, a sleep walker.

I'm not familiar with the Philosophical Zombie. Sleepwalker is apt. My understanding is that people who are asleep certainly still experience their environment-- noise, light levels, hot and cold, sometimes even processing what people say. It's just that the experiences are processed differently.

[hadespussercats]

Do you think a puppy or a prion or a grasshopper experiences the illusion of a self?

If my earlier conjecture is correct, I think a puppy probably does. I think a prion does not, at least not at any level that would be recognizable to us. I'm not so sure about a grasshopper; the coherent behavior of some insects is no more complex than that of some computer programs, and according to my conjecture, if the grasshopper is conscious, so are those computer programs.

Of course, at the opposite extreme from my previous conjecture, perhaps only some humans are actually conscious and the rest only behave as if they were conscious. I can remember when I first encountered the problem of consciousness, in a discussion with a Catholic friend who saw it as an argument against atheism. At the time I completely missed his argument. Possibly I just wasn't paying sufficient attention to the words, but it's also possible that I wasn't actually conscious back then, so I lacked the experiential background to intuitively grasp what he was getting at.

Of course if having actual consciousness causes an experiential background, that implies that consciousness isn't pure supervention, which raises more questions.

This is really interesting:

perhaps only some humans are actually conscious and the rest only behave as if they were conscious.

What do you all think of that notion-- what are the implications for what consciousness is if this is true?

When you say experiential background, do you mean memories, or a certain sort of memory, or something else?

[GrahamH]

And, I may be mucking up the waters here, but if I were in a persistent vegetative state, or otherwise severely brain damaged but still able to live (in advanced dementia, perhaps) I'd still be/have whatever it is that is my Self (I know, Warren, that makes it sound like a thing. But I think we have been referencing it as functions, grouped together under the general rubric or purpose as Self.) But I don't feel as though "I" would exist anymore.

I don't think it was me who objected to the terminology. I know what you mean.

However - are you "you" when you are asleep and not dreaming? I think we should be careful about people in comas or persistent vegetative states, as there are cases of their waking after many years:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... years.html

Sometimes they are conscious of some of the things that go on around them, even if they show no outward sign of understanding, as with this woman who had learned something of 9/11 in the middle of her two decade coma:

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500178_162-757388.html

More evidence that just because people can't tell us what they are experiencing, does not mean they aren't experiencing anything:

http://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpres ... rroudings/

Hm. I see what you're getting at, but it's a little different from where I was coming from.

Let me see if I can phrase it better in a hypothetical--
If my self is a collection of functions performed collaboratively within my brain (and other parts of my body), then I would agree that my self is still my self whether waking, sleeping, in a coma, etc., barring really excessive damage to the apparatus.

However, if I were to start acting while physically awake the way I do while I'm asleep (if that's even possible to picture, given the different paces of functions and types of functions my brain and body carry out, but run with me, if you can), I don't think I'd be the same person. I'm pretty sure my friends and family would think there was something deeply wrong about me, perhaps even something absent, that would make me effectively a different person to them.

I don't understand what you mean. If you acted as you do when sleeping then you would appear to be asleep, even if you were awake and experiencing your situation. Isn't this a sort of locked-in syndrome?

The opposite situation is if you act as if awake, but you are not experiencing your situation. Then we have a Philosophical Zombie or, possibly, a sleep walker.

I'm not familiar with the Philosophical Zombie. Sleepwalker is apt. My understanding is that people who are asleep certainly still experience their environment-- noise, light levels, hot and cold, sometimes even processing what people say. It's just that the experiences are processed differently.

I suppose people who know you awake will think you are the same person asleep, or comatose, because you still look like you, and they have no reason to suppose you are not you. It's you asleep.

Generally people don't experience their environment while asleep. Sometimes sleep might be disturbed and something about the disturbance might feature in a dream, but perhaps that is the person briefly regaining consciousness then falling asleep again.

I don't know about you, but when I wake up it is not with a memory of having lain in my bed for hours. I'm unlikely to know if there were sounds of rain in the night unless it wakes me up.

If you think sleep walking is apt perhaps I still have your meaning backward. A sleep walker doesn't act as if asleep while being awake. They act as if awake while being asleep. They move around with reasonable motor control and you might think they were awake, but they don't show normal conscious responses if you talk to them and and they don't remember what they did in the night, once they wake up.

Are you concerned with the personal identity issue here?

[GrahamH]

A philosophical Zombie (PZ) is a bit like a sleep walker, but more so. It is proposed that a being could exist that was behaviourally identical to a "normal conscious human", yet have no inner life, no sensation or subjectivity. It is somewhat controversial, since such a PZ could talk apparently meaningfully about how it feels, what it thinks about this or that, its emotional states, and yet is said not to have such feelings or states.

One way to think of this is to imagine an android equipped with a mind simulation that maps to its behaviour. The android monitors itself and constructs "explanations" in subjective terms. For example, if tactile stress sensor activates on the androids arm it might refer to this as "My arm hurts". If its energy cells are low on charge it might refer to this state as "I'm hungry" and if it is searching to a solution to some situation (Siri finding an answer to a difficult question requiring a deep search, say) it might describe its activity as "I'm thinking hard" or "I'm confused".

So one way to think of this is as fakery. A machine (could be a biological machine) mapping its function to anthropomorphic language because a designer of the machine wanted it to seem human.

The interesting thing about this is that each "empty subjective statement" actually has a referent in the machine's functions.

This issue applies in solipsism, where you suppose that all the people you don;t really have minds of their own, but are merely made to behave as if they do. In Solipsim there is only you and a lot of P-Zombies, and it's your (unconscious) mind writing the script for the PZs.

[Azathoth]

A PZ

[surreptitious57]

I think personality is behavior, not identity. When you go to sleep or go under general anesthesia or whatever, your behavior stops. You don't have a personality during that time. But people don't consider themselves as ceasing to be a Self during that time. You're still identified as the same person, both socially and legally. Since scientific investigation into the reality of the Self is an empirical investigation, observable behavior or substance would be the subject. (I'm glad science is taking this investigation from philosophers who just sit around swapping opinions and making metaphysical claims without empirical evidence to support them.)

Or, let me put it another way. In that TED Talk, the scientist described how her personality changed dramatically as the stroke progressed, switching from right-brain dominated thought-behavior to left-brain thought-behavior. She said it was like she had two Selves inside her. But she's just one person. People with multiple personality disorders and whatnot aren't really multiple people, are they? If personality = Self, we'd have no choice but to regard them as multiple people, I think. Until they got cured maybe.

I do not think personality is an absolute, rather a variable on a continuum that is determined by experience and knowledge. One often talks about not being the same person. I, for example, am not the same person I was, say, twenty years ago. My mindset and emotional disposition are different, maybe even significantly so. There is therefore a gradual change or alteration in personality, albeit not as extreme as the one described above pertaining to the stroke. This can be such that it is not actually noticeable over a small period of time. But over a long period, it most certainly is.

I also am not absolutely certain about your claim that you do not have a personality when you go to sleep. It is just that it is not observable. But that does not mean it is no longer there. Personality does not need observation to function though, does it? When one is asleep, one may appear to be completely unconscious, but the mind may be referencing a dream during the REM sleep state. So far from being dormant, one is actually engaging on a very active level.

[FBM]

That raises some interesting questions, surreptitious57. I won't bombard you with all of them. Instead, I'll start with 'Are you reifying personality?' Behavior isn't an entity, and thus can't be the Self of the conventional definition. The Self is said to be an enduring entity. Behavior is fleeting...

[surreptitious57]

That raises some interesting questions, surreptitious57. I won't bombard you with all of them. Instead, I'll start with Are you reifying personality? Behavior isn't an entity, and thus can't be the Self of the conventional definition. The Self is said to be an enduring entity. Behavior is fleeting...

I agree that behaviour is not an entity, whereas the Self is, but I do not think it is that simple. Behaviour is a discipline of the Self. At least in thought if not in action, since the Self by definition has conscious capability. Behaviour is also not fleeting in a general sense. It may be in a specific sense, as pertaining to a particular action, but it is a variable too on a continuum with thoughts and actions being determined by emotions. So there is a connection therefore between behaviour and the Self. The Self to me is more of a state of being, rather than of thinking or doing, so the connection may not be so absolute. But everything by definition is directly or indirectly connected. The Self may be like the soul in that it cannot be physically identified, but still exists. Not that I believe in the soul now, but just using it as a comparative example. But without consciousness, there would be no Self. Consciousness is a capability of a natural organism. A natural organism is a physical entity. Therefore a connection between the physical and the mental exists. That is how I see it anyway. I am sure it is more complex than that but that is my understanding of it at a very basic level however.

[Audley Strange]

When it comes to this sort of thing I still cannot shake off the part of me that has an affinity to mysticism. As such I have little to add except a question. Often, very very often, I sit in front of a blank a/3 sheet of paper with headphones on and a pencil and just draw. Often, very very often, what sense of self I have seems to completely vanish into "the work" so to speak to the extent that hours can pass and I'm suddenly aware that I'm aware again and have drawn a page.

It ALWAYS comes back though, that awareness of self and usually I find myself kind of hyper and excitable. Now I am well aware the brain is not a muscle, but when I'm sitting doing that, sometimes I forget to move also and my leg goes "dead" and when I do start to move it, it gets pins and needles as the blood starts pumping through it again.

Could both be analogous? Could the kind of trance state I enter be restricting neurochemicals from other areas of the brain in a "normal" aware state to focus on what I'm doing/being at that point?

[FBM]

That raises some interesting questions, surreptitious57. I won't bombard you with all of them. Instead, I'll start with Are you reifying personality? Behavior isn't an entity, and thus can't be the Self of the conventional definition. The Self is said to be an enduring entity. Behavior is fleeting...

I agree that behaviour is not an entity, whereas the Self is, but I do not think it is that simple. Behaviour is a discipline of the Self. At least in thought if not in action, since the Self by definition has conscious capability. Behaviour is also not fleeting in a general sense. It may be in a specific sense, as pertaining to a particular action, but it is a variable too on a continuum with thoughts and actions being determined by emotions. So there is a connection therefore between behaviour and the Self. The Self to me is more of a state of being, rather than of thinking or doing, so the connection may not be so absolute. But everything by definition is directly or indirectly connected. The Self may be like the soul in that it cannot be physically identified, but still exists. Not that I believe in the soul now, but just using it as a comparative example. But without consciousness, there would be no Self. Consciousness is a capability of a natural organism. A natural organism is a physical entity. Therefore a connection between the physical and the mental exists. That is how I see it anyway. I am sure it is more complex than that but that is my understanding of it at a very basic level however.

I still think you're reifying an abstract, which is the first error. I think the Self you're describing is abstract, not concrete. Abstracts are convenient fictions, but you can't put them under a microscope or measure them or detect them in any way. You can only detect concrete examples that you categorize and put an abstract noun to. But abstracts aren't the domain of scientific analysis, though like everyone else, scienctists do use abstract nouns in a post hoc manner. By way of demonstration, where and what is the Self in an individual human being?

[GrahamH]

The Self Illusion

[FBM]

That was great, GrahahH! Very concise and to the point.