Not long ago we would have considered the idea of driverless cars laughable science fiction. Driverless Uber taxis are now a reality on the streets of Pittsburgh and they are being rolled out in San Francisco. Sriram is fond of using car/driver analogy to illustrate the relationship between body/soul. I'll suggest we can use the Uber model to understand why the concept of illusory self is truer.
In an evolutionary parallel we could liken your car in the garage to an organism in the PreCambrian. The earliest creatures were deaf, dumb and blind. Now we have cars that don't need a human guide because we have endowed them with visual sensors and software of their own to make sense of that information. This parallels similar developments in the Cambrian explosion.
An Uber taxi now does not need a driver because it can drive itself; how much more sophisticated is a human body than a driverless car ? A human body has autonomy - it drives itself without the need for a separate driver.
Consider this : we don't yet have the technology to do this well, but suppose the artificial intelligence team at Google developed a holographic virtual driver projection in the driving seat. I would put money on it that taxis with an apparent virtual driver would get more rides than those with an empty driver seat. This acknowledges a curiosity of human nature, that we would quickly accept and build confidence in a virtual driver despite knowing that it is a hologram. In the same way, humans of the future will fall in love with their domestic synths. The same phenomenon is demonstrated by the
rubber hand illusion, in which we can easily be induced into accepting and experiencing a false and unconnected apparent limb as an actual limb.
The self is an emergent property property of the body rather like a virtual driver would be created by the car. I suggest that the concept of a virtual self, a projection courtesy of proprioception, an apparent driver for the human body, is truer to evidence and less problematic than traditional notions of intangible inner beings occupying a body temporarily. Cognitive science has shown us for instance that the conscious self is not really in control, just as a virtual Uber driver would not really be in control. Real decision making goes on before and underneath conscious awareness; conscious awareness follows retrospectively, almost as an afterthought. An emergent, apparent self, raises no problems explaining how immaterial beings could interact with matter. An emergent, virtual self, is consistent with the observation that the self dissolves on going to sleep, is compromised by various brain pathologies and disappears altogether when the body dies. An emergent, virtual self, is consistent with the observation that the development of the self mirrors the development of the body - a two year old for instance has not yet developed a full on form of consciousness that incorporates self awareness - are we supposed to believe that a two year old has not got its soul yet ?
An emergent virtual self might be counter to all our traditional intuitions, but it demolishes at a stroke a host of inconsistencies that the physical sciences have thrown up. A body with a virtual self would have a competitive advantage over one without such, just as surely as Uber taxis with a hologrammatic virtual driver would get more rides than one without.
