Atheists, do you subscribe to the idea of the illusion of self?

[torridon]

It is illusory in the sense that its makeup changes over time.  The self you identified with as a seven year old is not likely to be the same as when a thirty year old. 

Yes thats very true. We tend to think we are the same person from birth to death, but in fact that 'person' is always slowly changing. I am probably quite a different person now to what I was at 20 years old, but because change is slow, we don't notice it.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

That is what happens with dementia; a build up of proteins in the brain affecting cognitive function which frequently has the outcome that the individual loses his sense of self, they no longer know who or what they are.  Physical brain decay is also the corresponding mind decay.  With other psychiatric conditions like xenomelia and dysmorphic disorders people sometimes believe that a limb is not theirs, it belongs to someone else, and sometimes resort to self-amputation to get rid of it.

But by suggesting mind equals brain by using the examples you do you are actually making the case for a real and functional school.
How does this eliminate a case made for the brain mediating between a consciousness and the material world since it could be argued that the brain is the line of communication? Since parsimony does not operate here because of the unknowns.

[torridon]

But by suggesting mind equals brain by using the examples you do you are actually making the case for a real and functional school.
How does this eliminate a case made for the brain mediating between a consciousness and the material world since it could be argued that the brain is the line of communication? Since parsimony does not operate here because of the unknowns.

The mind has a physiological basis (ie the brain), that doesn't equate to all products of mind being real - I can imagine a pink elephant now, that doesn't mean pink elephants are real because my brain is made of flesh. My pink elephant is a construct of mind, likewise, my sense of self is a construct of mind that has utility.

Not sure what you are getting at in the second para.

[Udayana]

hmmm... I met up with a bunch of old friends, from school, the other day. Over the years all the cells in their brains and bodies have changed, and they don't look as they did when we were at school. Most of the views about things have also changed due to their varied experiences and so on. However they are still recognizably the same people  (selves); we can even pick up the same conversations we were having 40 odd years ago.

My mum has dementia and her memory and some other thinking processes are disintegrating daily, are we supposed to pretend we don't know who she is?

What makes up this illusory self? It's not physical cells certainly .. it's not even information as this can also change, more to do with how information is processed.
 

[torridon]

hmmm... I met up with a bunch of old friends, from school, the other day. Over the years all the cells in their brains and bodies have changed, and they don't look as they did when we were at school. Most of the views about things have also changed due to their varied experiences and so on. However they are still recognizably the same people  (selves); we can even pick up the same conversations we were having 40 odd years ago.

Me too, I met up with a guy that was one of my best friends at school recently.  Hadn't seen him in 40 years. It was a bit strange, and rather unsettling in a way.  I could recognise him and we had lots of shared memories to laugh about.  But I did have trouble believing it was the same person, the thing that really threw me was his voice - much deeper now. I think voices are very individual and we recognise people by the sound of their voice as much as anything, yet 40 years on, this guy's voice was nothing like his 19 year old voice. So I got to pondering, is he the same person with changes applied, or a is he a different, a new person, a stranger to me, who has inherited some of the characters and memories of someone I used to know once by virtue of cell replication.  Of course we run with the former concept normally, that is the more convenient, and it fits with our common intuitions about life and identity, but the latter might be truer to reality.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

There seems to be a suggestion here that somehow an electrical system is being tricked into thinking it is something more than what it is. That is in fact a repudiation of the concept of emergent properties.
It is what it is.

I'm sorry Torridon but your idea of illusion is merely a construct to protect the doctrine and dogma of unconscious matter.

[Jack Knave]

You describe a self thus:
a self is something emergent, a composite thing, an ephemeral thing, a transient thing, a collection of fairly persistent qualities and tendancies; it vanishes every night when we go to sleep, and is eroded irreversibly by dementia.

How is the above a description of an illusion of self rather than a self?

You talk about the emergent and yet use reductionist methodology to state this:

Has any neuroscientist identified a self using brain imaging ?

In neuroanatomy, is there a cortical structure where the self resides ?

The self is an emergent property or it is not a property. You might be right you might be wrong but the above is reductionist.

If you go down that line you might as well say that the brain is an illusion because it is emergent from a group of tissues.

Quite. That would make our ideas, memories, feelings et al just one big illusion; in fact our whole psychology.

And then we get to the Idealist view of the world...

[Jack Knave]

A brain exists in any normal sense of the word; we can weigh it, measure it, dissect it. Not so with a self.  A self is comprised of many underlying component characteristics. Say I have a love of marmite, and also I have a fear of heights; these things are part of what makes me, me.  Does a fear of heights exist ?  Well, there are primary neural correlates for the constituent characteristics of personhood.  Our technology might not quite be up to it yet, but in principle we would be able to use scanning technology to observe my love of marmite and my fear of heights, but there is no primary neural correlate for the self. A feeling of self is something created on the fly as part of the fabric of conscious experience.

A quick thought experiment to flesh this out a bit : recall the last time you made a decision.  Say the last time you were thirsty and were deciding whether to have a cup of tea or a cup of coffee.  Put that moment of decision making under a microscope. How it feels is somewhat analogous to a court, where there are competing claims and a judge presiding over the case. He listens to both respondents and adjudicates, wisely, we hope.  That's how it feels and that judge is the self or person within us; it is the executive wielding his power.  But in reality brains do not make decisions like that.  There is no judge in the inner courthouse of our mind, there are only competing desires, each rival desire has its own neural correlates and a moment of decision occurs when one circuit manages to gain precedence over the other circuit.  That we feel there is a single point of authority and experience and volition is really an illusion, 'we' only find out about what decision occurred after the event; it is like a piece of flattery that helps to empower a sense of agency and independence.  There cannot be a master neuron adjudicating in the brain - if there were then the master neuron would need its own brain with which to dispense wisdom and make choices.

But who feels the sensation of being thirsty?

And who feels or perceives this thirst in a particular and personal way. The electrical currents in the brain don't show this up as they all look the same no matter which brain you look at.

[Nearly Sane]

But who feels the sensation of being thirsty?

And who feels or perceives this thirst in a particular and personal way. The electrical currents in the brain don't show this up as they all look the same no matter which brain you look at.

the insertion of a who here is classic begging the question, assuming that such a thing needs a who to be felt. When a plant moves in line with the sun, is there a little who moving it?

[Jack Knave]

The mind has a physiological basis (ie the brain), that doesn't equate to all products of mind being real - I can imagine a pink elephant now, that doesn't mean pink elephants are real because my brain is made of flesh. My pink elephant is a construct of mind, likewise, my sense of self is a construct of mind that has utility.

Not sure what you are getting at in the second para.

Where is that image or picture of the pink elephant? It is not found in the neurons. And someone must be viewing it...

And how does a brain with its fixed structure think of a pink elephant if the wiring or connections for such an image isn't there?

[Nearly Sane]

Where is that image or picture of the pink elephant? It is not found in the neurons. And someone must be viewing it...

And how does a brain with its fixed structure think of a pink elephant if the wiring or connections for such an image isn't there?

and so on ad infinitum. If there isn't a who viewing inside the 'who' that you inserted by begging the question, it's pink elephants all the way down.

[Nearly Sane]

The self as illusion is a metaphor, as indeed is the 'self'. Metaphors have limited explanatory powers though they may be about all we have at the moment. The question is about what is any individual's definition of what they mean by 'self' and how much explanatory power that has for what can be observed.


I don't see anything on the thread which makes clear what definition is being used, so how could one answer?

[Jack Knave]

the insertion of a who here is classic begging the question, assuming that such a thing needs a who to be felt. When a plant moves in line with the sun, is there a little who moving it?

But does a plant think to itself, "I'm moving"?

The thing is I observe many aspects of myself in what is called consciousness and self reflection.

But my point was the way we feel things, which can't be seen or analysed in the neurons. The process of pain can be followed as it makes its way to the brain and so forth but how we feel pain isn't shown in this process.

[Jack Knave]

and so on ad infinitum. If there isn't a who viewing inside the 'who' that you inserted by begging the question, it's pink elephants all the way down.

I don't follow. What do mean.

[Nearly Sane]

But does a plant think to itself, "I'm moving"?

The thing is I observe many aspects of myself in what is called consciousness and self reflection.

But my point was the way we feel things, which can't be seen or analysed in the neurons. The process of pain can be followed as it makes its way to the brain and so forth but how we feel pain isn't shown in this process.

I have no idea what a plant thinks, I'm not really sure what as Nagel would put it a bat thinks, and as for you, the problems of hard solipsism intervenes.


So that leaves this internal stuff, and despite Descartes, the idea of 'I' seems to begging the question again.

Oh, and, extra, extra, not sure how you can assert that there is a state that cannot be analysed. What's the difference here between 'sun moving ' and 'sore' as inputs?

[Nearly Sane]

I don't follow. What do mean.

If you follow dualism, and have an observer that has the ability to create observation, then you would need an observer within that observer, to give it the ability to create observation for that observer, etc etc

[Jack Knave]

The self as illusion is a metaphor, as indeed is the 'self'. Metaphors have limited explanatory powers though they may be about all we have at the moment. The question is about what is any individual's definition of what they mean by 'self' and how much explanatory power that has for what can be observed.


I don't see anything on the thread which makes clear what definition is being used, so how could one answer?

I agree here that a definition of self would be hard to pin down.

[torridon]

I'm sorry Torridon but your idea of illusion is merely a construct to protect the doctrine and dogma of unconscious matter.

Eh ?  I have no idea where that comes from.

One of the notions currently gaining weight in our efforts to understand consciousness is that consciousness may well be modelled as a fifth fundamental state of matter, to add to solid, liquid, gas and plasma; a state of rich particulate communication facilitated by the particular characteristic structural arrangements of matter found in brains.  This is an example of us breaking out of classical views, boldy hypothesising new ways of thinking; hardly 'doctrine and dogma'. 

[torridon]

But who feels the sensation of being thirsty?

And who feels or perceives this thirst in a particular and personal way. The electrical currents in the brain don't show this up as they all look the same no matter which brain you look at.

Trouble is, Jack, you're sounding like Alan Burns here, with his souls answering the need for a perceiver to do the perceiving.  Even most atheists are still in the mind grip of Cartesian duallism.  If we want to understand mind without recourse to magic and without invoking infinite regresses of minds within minds, we have to work with what there is, that means dropping duallism.

[Jack Knave]

If you follow dualism, and have an observer that has the ability to create observation, then you would need an observer within that observer, to give it the ability to create observation for that observer, etc etc

But this is true for your system or approach but in reverse. Why does this ad infinitum necessity you explained above stop at the brain? It is quite plain to all of us that an observer is occurring at the point you wish it to stop at, i.e. our consciousness, but why should it do this if you say this then needs an observer? And, if what you say is true about this then to avoid the ad infinitum it can't/shouldn't start at all so your approach would say that consciousness shouldn't even be possible and even reach this point in the process that we human's have? Your system would say that at best there would be fairly simple chemicals that reproduce themselves, beyond that nothing would be possible.

And throwing in the term emergent properties doesn't even start to explain or deal with this problem.

[Jack Knave]

Trouble is, Jack, you're sounding like Alan Burns here, with his souls answering the need for a perceiver to do the perceiving.  Even most atheists are still in the mind grip of Cartesian duallism.  If we want to understand mind without recourse to magic and without invoking infinite regresses of minds within minds, we have to work with what there is, that means dropping duallism.

See #44

[Nearly Sane]

But this is true for your system or approach but in reverse. Why does this ad infinitum necessity you explained above stop at the brain? It is quite plain to all of us that an observer is occurring at the point you wish it to stop at, i.e. our consciousness, but why should it do this if you say this then needs an observer? And, if what you say is true about this then to avoid the ad infinitum it can't/shouldn't start at all so your approach would say that consciousness shouldn't even be possible and even reach this point in the process that we human's have? Your system would say that at best there would be fairly simple chemicals that reproduce themselves, beyond that nothing would be possible.

And throwing in the term emergent properties doesn't even start to explain or deal with this problem.

What system do you think I have suggested?

[Jack Knave]

Eh ?  I have no idea where that comes from.

One of the notions currently gaining weight in our efforts to understand consciousness is that consciousness may well be modelled as a fifth fundamental state of matter, to add to solid, liquid, gas and plasma; a state of rich particulate communication facilitated by the particular characteristic structural arrangements of matter found in brains.  This is an example of us breaking out of classical views, boldy hypothesising new ways of thinking; hardly 'doctrine and dogma'.

You're starting to sound like Alan Burns or perhaps I should say Nick Marks. Next you'll be sprinkling in the fairy dust...

[Jack Knave]

What system do you think I have suggested?

The one where this process of consciousness stops at the brain and is a function of an emergent process. Your explanation of where/what consciousness comes from/is.

Now explain why the ad infinitum process in reverse as I have explained does not apply to your 'system'.

[Nearly Sane]

The one where this process of consciousness stops at the brain and is a function of an emergent process. Your explanation of where/what consciousness comes from/is.

and where have I laid out this system?