The Illusion of the Self

[FBM]

The abstraction is when it becomes metaphysics.

OK, I seem to begin to understand what you mean. Metaphysics is to me something ultimately disconnected from experience, something out there in the ontological sky the way Plato held the existence of "essentials" to be, without which we could not form any ideas whatsoever. His was the top-down version of philosophy. Without an ontological "one", "justice", "love" for example, we could never form mathematical concepts, or those pertaining to law or empathy, according to him. That is metaphysics to me.

My vaguely formed concept of the self, or the illusion of the self for that matter, is not metaphysical in the platonic sense. To me, whatever the self is or is not, is ultimately grounded in the material world.

Edit: Bungled my first response. Here's what I intended to post, in full:



Good again, then. We're on the same track, after all. Plato had his head up his ass.

Not so incidentally, neuroscience or cognitive science or both have identified, iirc, 3 areas of the brain (I'll have to look up which ones) that collaborate to continuously generate the sense of agency, aka, the sense of self, during waking hours. I'll provide links to the details if someone wants, but the point is that every experience an individual has is the product of brain functions, which are the result of the brains physical connections with the 5 senses. Now, the senses just pick up and transmit whatever stimuli from the environment that they come into contact with. The brain is where, as far as I know, those sensations are modeled together into an amalgamated representation of the external world. But, as in the case of optical illusions, the brain doesn't always model correctly. In order to counter this well-known capacity for error, science developed.

[hadespussercats]

I am working through this thread, but I arrived late and it might take me a while to catch up. Cheers!

[Hermit]

The wild end of abstract mathematics certainly starts to cozy up to metaphysics, when we start to consider transcendental numbers or uncountable infinities...

Maths can certainly get weird. I'm not at all surprised at the number of prominent mathematicians who went insane or at least suffered a mental breakdown. But the path to the strange world it enters is not via the stipulation of an ontological level of existence as such. It gets there through the abstraction of sensory experience and the extrapolation thereof.

[Hermit]

The abstraction is when it becomes metaphysics.

OK, I seem to begin to understand what you mean. Metaphysics is to me something ultimately disconnected from experience, something out there in the ontological sky the way Plato held the existence of "essentials" to be, without which we could not form any ideas whatsoever. His was the top-down version of philosophy. Without an ontological "one", "justice", "love" for example, we could never form mathematical concepts, or those pertaining to law or empathy, according to him. That is metaphysics to me.

My vaguely formed concept of the self, or the illusion of the self for that matter, is not metaphysical in the platonic sense. To me, whatever the self is or is not, is ultimately grounded in the material world.

Cool. Then we're on the same page, after all. Plato had his head up his ass on the thing with "Forms."

Perhaps. I would not want to sully mathematics by saying it is metaphysical, but then I may just be semantically anal in this context.

Actually, I'm not! Don't fucking even imply that mathematics is in any way metaphysical. Not even by qualifying it with "but based on necessary inference".

With that, I better fuck off for a while, lest I really go to pieces in public again.

In that case, I won't ask you where 2 is. Or pi. Or the square root of a negative number.

They live as abstracts, but not abstracts in the metaphysical sense. They are abstracted from sensory experience.

[Hermit]

The abstraction is when it becomes metaphysics.

OK, I seem to begin to understand what you mean. Metaphysics is to me something ultimately disconnected from experience, something out there in the ontological sky the way Plato held the existence of "essentials" to be, without which we could not form any ideas whatsoever. His was the top-down version of philosophy. Without an ontological "one", "justice", "love" for example, we could never form mathematical concepts, or those pertaining to law or empathy, according to him. That is metaphysics to me.

My vaguely formed concept of the self, or the illusion of the self for that matter, is not metaphysical in the platonic sense. To me, whatever the self is or is not, is ultimately grounded in the material world.

Edit: Bungled my first response. Here's what I intended to post, in full:

Good again, then. We're on the same track, after all. Plato had his head up his ass.

Not so incidentally, neuroscience or cognitive science or both have identified, iirc, 3 areas of the brain (I'll have to look up which ones) that collaborate to continuously generate the sense of agency, aka, the sense of self, during waking hours. I'll provide links to the details if someone wants, but the point is that every experience an individual has is the product of brain functions, which are the result of the brains physical connections with the 5 senses. Now, the senses just pick up and transmit whatever stimuli from the environment that they come into contact with. The brain is where, as far as I know, those sensations are modeled together into an amalgamated representation of the external world. But, as in the case of optical illusions, the brain doesn't always model correctly. In order to counter this well-known capacity for error, science developed.

Yes, I go with that too. And that there is no homunculus or a soul. I also note with approval that you managed to express your brief exposition without the need to use the word 'metaphysical'.

[rasetsu]

@ rasetsu: First of all, sorry in advance if I didn't get your intended meaning perfectly, but I hope I can say something helpful. The Buddhist concept of anatta isn't nihilist. It doesn't claim that nothing exists or that what happens in your brain isn't real. In fact, from what I've garnered from Buddhist philosophers (Western), reality for Buddhism is synonymous with the subjective experience. Illusions are real...illusions. Misperceptions. Like an optical illusion that makes you think the wheel is turning when it's not.

I think you took two unrelated parts of my post and smushed them together. The only substantive thing I said about Anatta was, "For what it's worth, while I am only beginning my researches into the area, it is in the doctrine of Anatta (that there is no-self) that I feel the Buddha most likely erred ... Anyway, as noted, the doctrine of Anatta is unfamiliar to me, and until I do my due diligence, all I can say is that I have a hunch." Where you got the notion that I felt the doctrine of Anatta is nihilist, I don't know.

Anyway, I'm choosing not to continue to participate in this thread. Goodbye.

[hadespussercats]

The wild end of abstract mathematics certainly starts to cozy up to metaphysics, when we start to consider transcendental numbers or uncountable infinities...

Maths can certainly get weird. I'm not at all surprised at the number of prominent mathematicians who went insane or at least suffered a mental breakdown. But the path to the strange world it enters is not via the stipulation of an ontological level of existence as such. It gets there through the abstraction of sensory experience and the extrapolation thereof.

I had some insights during a breakdown about the nature of self. Now I'm realizing that rasetsu had a good point earlier about needing to keep some ideas close to the chest (or words to that effect.)

I'm going to keep on eavesdropping. Maybe later on I'll find there are thoughts I want to share. Until then, I'm really enjoying the conversation.

[FBM]

IMO, reification is a more useful term than abstraction in the case of the Self.

[surreptitious57]

But, as in the case of optical illusions, the brain doesn't always model correctly.

The brain does more than just not model correctly. Apparently, it engages in deliberate deception too. Tests carried out pertaining to the placebo effect demonstrate this. Usually a placebo works only when the patient is unaware of it. However, it has been shown that dental patients perceived less pain when being administered a placebo, which had no painkilling capabilities at all, after being told so, than with medication which was a painkiller. The brain is fully aware of false information being processed here, yet regards it as true. So much so, that the patient ends up believing such fiction, despite knowing it to be so.

All this is rather mind boggling, to say the least, and confirms that our brains are far more complex than we can even begin to realise. If they are perfectly capable of deliberate self deception, and we know that, then the question has to be asked: how much control do we really have over our own thoughts? Do we actually possess thoughts we can refer to as our own? Or are they mental constructs that we have no input into, or significantly less so than we thought?

There is also evidence to suggest that we do not act or think spontaneously. Experiments show that all thoughts or actions are actually pre determined before we take the decision to think or act accordingly. The decision occurs a mere fraction of a second before it is actually carried out, and which is so tiny , as to be incapable of detection. This gives lie to the belief that there is such a thing as free will.

It appears then that far from being in absolute control of our thoughts, that we are actually a vehicle for the brain's function and not the other way round. Our brain, in other words, controls us, not us it. One must be careful about making oversimplified generalisations however from a few controlled experiments. That would be unwise. Nevertheless, at the very least, it can be shown that if we do have control over our thoughts, that it is not as absolute as we would like to think.

[FBM]

If you haven't already seen this, you might find it interesting:

Well, I can't find the full version at the moment. Here's the abstract...

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11 ... .2112.html

Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain

Chun Siong Soon1,2, Marcel Brass1,3, Hans-Jochen Heinze4 & John-Dylan Haynes1,2


Top of page
There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

And if you want to see him explain it in a lecture video: http://videolectures.net/eccs08_haynes_udofdithb/

[JimC]

As we peer with more and more precision into brain processes during conscious (and unconscious) cognition, it seems more and more that the "I" that seems so self-evidently to be the sole active agent, the seat of our being, is in fact simply a useful fiction. Perhaps it could be described as an internal summary of the current dynamic of the brain, a summary which makes it easier for the hominid in question to act effectively...

[FBM]

Seems that way to me, too, Jim. Last year, while I was writing a paper for grad school, I looked up where neuroscientists say the sense of self/agency is generated in the brain during waking hours. Turns out that three or so different regions work in concert to produce this sense. I'll look it up again, if you're interested. I think my point in that paper was that having a sense of free will doesn't entail that we actually have free will. Or a Self riding along somewhere in a cartesian theatre.

[JimC]

Seems that way to me, too, Jim. Last year, while I was writing a paper for grad school, I looked up where neuroscientists say the sense of self/agency is generated in the brain during waking hours. Turns out that three or so different regions work in concert to produce this sense. I'll look it up again, if you're interested. I think my point in that paper was that having a sense of free will doesn't entail that we actually have free will. Or a Self riding along somewhere in a cartesian theatre.

Agreed, but I see the continuously constructed and somewhat illusory self as having a certain degree of pragmatic reality. As long is one is not too attached to it...

Whatever one is...

[FBM]

Self-preservation is healthy behavior...

[hadespussercats]

Let's take as a given that I is a useful fiction.

Where does the ability to generate and control the concept/image of I come from? How is the story being told, without a storyteller?