The Illusion of Self

[torridon]

As you started this thread to deal with self, some properties of human beings:
- gender
- consciousness / self-awareness
- senses
- reproductive ability, especially the complementary roles involved in sexual reproduction

Explain any of these with A and then the question is, what is the explanation for A? Evolution says B.
What is the explanation for B? Evolution says C
What is the explanation for C? Evolution says D
...

Regress back far enough and you have a something from nothing scenario, the ultimate example of how the problem of what clearly needs an external influence is disguised; what exists (nothing) being the cause of that which emerges (something).

This is beginning to look like your stock contribution to any thread. As far as I can recall as regards this, in the most general terms, my understanding is that complex things derive from simpler things and this is mirrored in the arrow of time with complexity building up from a simple early universe.  The problem with this is that implies a singularity of something from nothing at the start,  The alternate scenario is that simple things derive from more complex things, the problem with this being it implies an infinite ladder of increasing upward complexity.  You prefer this scenario but you haven't said what your justification is, so I don't see the justification for your denial of this thread on the same apparently arbitrary basis.  So why not just address this thread within its own frame of reference.  All I am saying is that the notion of a virtual driver for an Uber taxi created by the vehicle's onboard software is a reasonable metaphor in evidence terms for how we can think of a selfhood or personhood.  It is truer to a modern evidence base in that it avoids the problems associated with the concept of a separate immaterial soul. Body goes to sleep, virtual self dissolves, no problem.  Body dies, virtual self no more; no problem.  Do you agree or not agree ?

[Alan Burns]

my understanding is that complex things derive from simpler things

Human creativity certainly can demonstrate that complex things can be built up from simpler things using intelligent interaction with this physical world, which mirrors God's abundant creativity in bringing us into existence.  The source of human creativity is bound up in the mysteries of conscious awareness and free will.  The source of God's creativity also remains a mystery beyond human understanding.

[Sriram]

There you go contradicting your own assertion.  You cannot go claiming that changes happen to a subject and one sentence later you are asserting a constant subject.  Either the subject is changed by experience or it isn't, you can't have it both ways.

I would endorse what Enki says above, we are changed constantly through interaction.  Nothing and nobody is an island, hermetically sealed off from the rest of the cosmos. We change our environment and the environment changes us.  This is consistent with my OP describing a virtual self as that is merely a projection from a constantly changing brain.
 
All very nice, but this Hindu philosophy is not derived from modern standards of evidence.  By contrast, I'm trying to put across a way of understanding these things that is authentic, true to the evidence.

torridon,

There is no contradiction at all. I'll tell you an allegory that I have stated here before.  This is from one of the Upanishads (Hindu philosophical texts dated from around 1000 BCE).

There were two birds sitting on a tree. First one was sitting on the top totally unconcerned, peaceful and serene. The second bird was on the lower branches busily eating away at the sweet fruits.   Suddenly the second bird bites into a bitter fruit. It feels pain, disgust and regret. It then looks up at the first bird sitting so calmly at the top and wishes he could also be like that.   He thereby hops a little closer to the other bird.

The bird then forgets its bitter experience and again starts eating away merrily all the fruits. Once again it bites into a bitter fruit, feels pain, regret and hops a little closer to the first bird.   This continues till finally the second bird merges into the first bird and only the one bird remains at the top.

This means the following.

1. There are two Self's to begin with.

2. One (Higher) is constant and does not get involved in the world

3. The second self (lower) experiences the world and enjoys it. 

4. However, suffering is inevitable when living in the world. That is the process through which development happens.

5. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin.

6. Every experience pushes us towards our Higher Self.

7. Finally, the second self (lower)  disappears altogether and only one Self remains which is eternal.

This allegory actually explains in very simple terms the fundamental philosophy of Hinduism (and its off shoots...Jainism, Buddhism etc). All the doubts about one self, two self's, eradicating the self, no self etc. can be understood through this one little story.

Cheers.

Sriram

[torridon]

Well that is a nice allegory, granted.  I'm not sure that it has much relevance in the context of this thread which is trying to understand the phenomenological nature of self in a way that is true to modern evidence through my more contemporary analogy. We can't talk about science and mythology in the same breath without inviting confusion.

[Sriram]

Well that is a nice allegory, granted.  I'm not sure that it has much relevance in the context of this thread which is trying to understand the phenomenological nature of self in a way that is true to modern evidence through my more contemporary analogy. We can't talk about science and mythology in the same breath without inviting confusion.

It was with reference to your post which I have quoted above. As regards the OP, I have already given my comments in the post no 2.

And the above story is not mythology. It is an allegory that seeks to explain the idea of the Self and its development. Its a philosophical explanation of the Self that you have discussed in the OP.

[SwordOfTheSpirit]

So why not just address this thread within its own frame of reference.

Fair enough.

All I am saying is that the notion of a virtual driver for an Uber taxi created by the vehicle's onboard software is a reasonable metaphor in evidence terms for how we can think of a selfhood or personhood.  It is truer to a modern evidence base in that it avoids the problems associated with the concept of a separate immaterial soul. Body goes to sleep, virtual self dissolves, no problem.  Body dies, virtual self no more; no problem.  Do you agree or not agree ?

You probably won't be surprised if I said that I disagree. Sticking to the remit that you've requested, here's one reason why. From your post:

It is truer to a modern evidence base in that it avoids the problems associated with the concept of a separate immaterial soul.

Surely the approach should be to try and solve any problems rather than avoid them, come up with an alternative and try and make the evidence fit?

[torridon]

Fair enough.
You probably won't be surprised if I said that I disagree. Sticking to the remit that you've requested, here's one reason why. From your post:Surely the approach should be to try and solve any problems rather than avoid them, come up with an alternative and try and make the evidence fit?

Eerm, a trivial misreading of the word 'avoid' there.  All I meant was in terms of Mr Ockham and his razor, a separate soul/spirit creates more new problems than it solves.  It terms of explanatory power it is one step forward and many steps back.

[Sriram]

Eerm, a trivial misreading of the word 'avoid' there.  All I meant was in terms of Mr Ockham and his razor, a separate soul/spirit creates more new problems than it solves.  It terms of explanatory power it is one step forward and many steps back.

Well...if we are forced to come up with such explanations as ...'the car produces its virtual driver'...and stuff like that...there isn't much to be said for Ockham and his razor IMO.   

[bluehillside Retd.]

SOTS,

Surely the approach should be to try and solve any problems rather than avoid them, come up with an alternative and try and make the evidence fit?

Occam's razor. You wouldn't (I assume) try to "solve any problems" with stork theory rather than avoid them completely by following the evidence that babies come from women's tums. For the same reason, fanciful conjectures like "soul" produce many more problems than solutions.

[Gordon]

Surely the approach should be to try and solve any problems rather than avoid them, come up with an alternative and try and make the evidence fit?

If the 'problem' involves a claim that is incoherent or where the justification for it is fallacious then there is no 'problem': just a spurious claim that can be dismissed.

[ekim]

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison's recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi
Wireless was a phony
It's the same old cry
But ho, ho, ho!
Who's got the last laugh now?

[Nearly Sane]

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison's recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi
Wireless was a phony
It's the same old cry
But ho, ho, ho!
Who's got the last laugh now?

“They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well they aren’t laughing now!”

Bob Monkhouse

[Nearly Sane]

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison's recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi
Wireless was a phony
It's the same old cry
But ho, ho, ho!
Who's got the last laugh now?

And of course

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan

[torridon]

Well...if we are forced to come up with such explanations as ...'the car produces its virtual driver'...and stuff like that...there isn't much to be said for Ockham and his razor IMO.   

Well this is precisely what the evidence suggests I would offer.  It is consistent with the observations that the person dies when the body dies, it is consistent with the observation that the person dissolves when we go to sleep or succumb to pathologies of the brain. It is consistent with the observation that body development seems to go hand in hand with the development of the person. It is consistent with research that demonstrates that the conscious self is in effect an afterthought rather than the real driver of choice and action. It is consistent with our understanding of proprioception.

On the other hand if you introduce a soul you are introducing huge new conceptual regions that have no basis in observation and no explanation.  Mr Ockham would disapprove of this scenario.  Better that we furnish explanations that fit the evidence and put our minds to try to understand them.

[Sriram]

Well this is precisely what the evidence suggests I would offer.  It is consistent with the observations that the person dies when the body dies, it is consistent with the observation that the person dissolves when we go to sleep or succumb to pathologies of the brain. It is consistent with the observation that body development seems to go hand in hand with the development of the person. It is consistent with research that demonstrates that the conscious self is in effect an afterthought rather than the real driver of choice and action. It is consistent with our understanding of proprioception.

On the other hand if you introduce a soul you are introducing huge new conceptual regions that have no basis in observation and no explanation.  Mr Ockham would disapprove of this scenario.  Better that we furnish explanations that fit the evidence and put our minds to try to understand them.

I don't give a damn what Occam would approve of!   You can't come up with idiotic explanations  just to stay with Occam's razor or whatever...!

For heavens's sake....fellas!  What the heck is the matter with you guys?!  You guys are tying yourselves  up in knots and building fences after fences around you with all your stuff......Occam's razor, logical fallacies, some other fallacy, whatever....!  Lots of rubbish!

Reality doesn't restrict itself to your boundaries.

You don't want to accept spirit and after-life etc. because there isn't sufficient empirical evidence and because you are scornful of anything associated with religion....that is fine.    I have no problem with that.  But coming up with ridiculous explanations and offering Occam's razor or whatever, as a reason is utter nonsense.

Face reality guys....with all its mysteries and possibilities.  Live life and experience it!   We don't know... is just fine! We don't need to know everything.

Sheesh!! 

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

I don't give a damn what Occam would approve of!   You can't come up with idiotic explanations  just to stay with Occam's razor or whatever...!

It's not "just to stay within Occam's razor" at all. Rather it's that, as they require many more assumptions than the alternatives, the conjectures you tout here are themselves most likely to be the "idiotic explanations".

For heavens's sake....fellas!  What the heck is the matter with you guys?!  You guys are tying yourselves  up in knots and building fences after fences around you with all your stuff......Occam's razor, logical fallacies, some other fallacy, whatever....!  Lots of rubbish!

Why do you think irrationalism is a better guide to probalbe truths than rationalism is?

Reality doesn't restrict itself to your boundaries.

No, but it does restrict itself to its own. What makes you think that your conjectures are reality?

You don't want to accept spirit and after-life etc. because there isn't sufficient empirical evidence and because you are scornful of anything associated with religion....that is fine.    I have no problem with that.  But coming up with ridiculous explanations and offering Occam's razor or whatever, as a reason is utter nonsense.

That's a straw man (another fallacy). Some of us don't accept them because they have no coherent defiinition, no proposal for where they might be, no description of their properties, no method to investigate whatever properties you think they do have, and no evidence of any kind to support them.

Apart from that though...

Face reality guys....with all its mysteries and possibilities.  Live life and experience it!   We don't know... is just fine! We don't need to know everything.

Sheesh!! 

"We don't know" is a good start, but sometimes we have to know things if we're to function in the world. We have methods to do that which establish probabilistic truths, but your conjectures are entirely untroubled by any such methods to validate them.

That's your problem.

[torridon]

I don't give a damn what Occam would approve of!   You can't come up with idiotic explanations  just to stay with Occam's razor or whatever...!

For heavens's sake....fellas!  What the heck is the matter with you guys?!  You guys are tying yourselves  up in knots and building fences after fences around you with all your stuff......Occam's razor, logical fallacies, some other fallacy, whatever....!  Lots of rubbish!

Reality doesn't restrict itself to your boundaries.

You don't want to accept spirit and after-life etc. because there isn't sufficient empirical evidence and because you are scornful of anything associated with religion....that is fine.    I have no problem with that.  But coming up with ridiculous explanations and offering Occam's razor or whatever, as a reason is utter nonsense.

Face reality guys....with all its mysteries and possibilities.  Live life and experience it!   We don't know... is just fine! We don't need to know everything.

Sheesh!! 

Some of us are interested in life though, and we want to understand it.  I don't see why that should be controversial.  Occam's razor of course is just a useful principle for anybody wanting to figure out a way to an explanation and experience shows that unnecessary complications in an explanation are a sign that it is flawed. As far as I can see, my analogy fits the available evidence neatly so is much more likely to be correct than explanations based on souls that have no evidential support.  Simple really.  The only difficulty is that my scenario is counterintuitive in some respects (aren't all significant advances in knowledge counter intuitive at first ?) and it requires us to get to grips with the hard problem of consciousness, a work in progress.  If you don't see any parallel problems with your ideas on spirits/souls it is likely because these ideas contain no comparable detail, you seem happy to run with them as vague poorly defined ideas.  But if we were to bring scientific levels of scrutiny and rigour to bear on them, start investigating how immaterial things interact with matter for instance, then you are going to run into problems orders of magnitude greater than in my much simpler scenario.  At the end of the day, if you care about whether your understanding is correct or not, then you will want to see that high level of rigour, sloppy work rarely produces good results.

[wigginhall]

There is a lot of bluster by various immaterialists on this thread, and other threads.   So Sriram waxes indignant about 'ridiculous explanations', and tells us to live life.   Then discussions about the soul seem to get reversed, no, you explain materialism, or humanism, but no, I'm not going to explain what the soul is.

The bluster seems to conceal not very much.   There is little in the way of detailed explanations, few references to research results, in fact,  few links of any description. 

Could it be that there is a huge elephant not in the room - what on earth is the immaterial?   Is the self supposed to be immaterial? 

[torridon]

Human creativity certainly can demonstrate that complex things can be built up from simpler things using intelligent interaction with this physical world, which mirrors God's abundant creativity in bringing us into existence.  The source of human creativity is bound up in the mysteries of conscious awareness and free will.  The source of God's creativity also remains a mystery beyond human understanding.

Religious thinking often seems to lead to 'mysteries' does it not ? In a way that science does not.  Science faces unexplained phenomena, religions end in mysteries.  I'll suggest a reason for the qualitative difference.  Religious reasoning is not based on any attempt at objective reason in the first place, rather it is based on subjective reasoning born of anthropocentrism and this soon leads to paradox in an objective sense.  I think there are innumerable examples of this, but just to run with the current one above, logic says that complexity arises out of simplicity; the illogic converse, however, that simplicity derives from complexity implies a never ending upwards ladder of complexity leading inevitably to a paradox.  Hence the mysteries of god are really the impossible paradoxes born of faulty underlying reasoning.

[wigginhall]

Brilliant stuff, torridon.   This kind of religion is not empirical. 

AB also tends to bring his conclusion into his initial reasoning, thus 'this physical world, which mirrors God's abundant creativity'.  Hello, when was God's creativity explained, and not just asserted?

[SusanDoris]

Brilliant stuff, torridon.   This kind of religion is not empirical. 

AB also tends to bring his conclusion into his initial reasoning, thus 'this physical world, which mirrors God's abundant creativity'.  Hello, when was God's creativity explained, and not just asserted?

I think that the answer to that is probably - throughout history' - and that's why so many people are still stuck* in the delusion that there is a god etc. .

*not quite the right word; I think of it as having an invisible barrier which is so soft and flexible that anybeliever accidentally leaning on or touching it is unaware of doing so. I think I was fortunate to have been able to step easily outside it; and  could have done so at a much earlier age if I had come into contact with more non-believers.

[ekim]

Religious thinking often seems to lead to 'mysteries' does it not ? In a way that science does not.  Science faces unexplained phenomena, religions end in mysteries.  I'll suggest a reason for the qualitative difference.  Religious reasoning is not based on any attempt at objective reason in the first place, rather it is based on subjective reasoning born of anthropocentrism and this soon leads to paradox in an objective sense.  I think there are innumerable examples of this, but just to run with the current one above, logic says that complexity arises out of simplicity; the illogic converse, however, that simplicity derives from complexity implies a never ending upwards ladder of complexity leading inevitably to a paradox.  Hence the mysteries of god are really the impossible paradoxes born of faulty underlying reasoning.

I think it depends upon which religions you are talking about.  For some it is more about life being a mystery to be lived rather than a problem to be explained and that living in harmony is better achieved in inner tranquility and simplicity rather than in a state of mental agitation and complexity.  Anthopocentrism would be seen as another form egotism and the sort of egotism which leads to, for example, the ecological state the planet is in now.  I don't think that the suggestion is 'simplicity derives from complexity' but more that simplicity can be found in the midst of complexity and that it is always there.

[torridon]

I think it depends upon which religions you are talking about.  For some it is more about life being a mystery to be lived rather than a problem to be explained and that living in harmony is better achieved in inner tranquility and simplicity rather than in a state of mental agitation and complexity.  Anthopocentrism would be seen as another form egotism and the sort of egotism which leads to, for example, the ecological state the planet is in now.  I don't think that the suggestion is 'simplicity derives from complexity' but more that simplicity can be found in the midst of complexity and that it is always there.

Yes, I accept, 'religions' was a bit broad brush; sloppy me.  Maybe I've spent too many years fighting creationists and it shows

[wigginhall]

I was arguing with a friend about this stuff, and she made the point that in Christianity, without a self, there is nothing to judge.  I thought that this clarified it for me, in one sense.   The self is paramount for most Christians, especially Protestants, since their whole idea of salvation hinges on it.  The self is bedraggled, and weighed down with sin, and can be redeemed by Christ.

OK, but what is this thing that is bedraggled and weighted down?   Is it an entity?  A conceptual structure?   A feeling?   Personality?

It's odd how Christianity has been rather slow to analyze this in any depth, but maybe they will find nothing there.   So maybe they rely on a rather unspoken set of ideas about the self, which often go unchallenged.

[Sriram]

Hi everyone,

This is relevant to the subject but deals with Buddhism.

There is a school of Buddhism called Theravada (earlier called Hinayana) in which they teach that there is no Self. The Self disappears when Nirvana is achieved. Nirvana is defined as a blowing out. They therefore also teach Anatma (No atma...No soul). These are important concepts in Theravada...which is the earliest school of Buddhism supposedly derived directly from the first direct disciples of Buddha. In sanskrit this school is called Sthaviravada (The way of the Elders). It is popular in Sri Lanka, Cambodia etc.

However, they also believe in Karma and rebirth. They teach their disciples to lead disciplined lives and avoid bad karma as it will perpetuate rebirth. This lead to questions that...if there is no atma... what is reborn, where is karma stored and what achieves Nirvana?! What is Nirvana and why should it be achieved if there is no atma? When people experience sunyata or  'nothing' during meditation, what or who experiences the 'nothing'?

This lead to a split in which the Mahasamghikas disagreed with the Theravada and formed the Mahayana school. It was realized that Buddha had taught about the self that is meant to be eradicated (the second bird in my above post) and that the eternal Self is constant. This forms the Mahayana school which is popular in Tibet, China and Japan.

For information.

Cheers.

Sriram